Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
SACRPH 2013 PAPER ABSTRACTS
FRIDAY OCTOBER 4, 2013 SESSIONS A - C
PAPER SESSION A
Session A1: Legacies of Nineteenth Century Networks Chair: TBD Comment: Peter Norton, University of Virginia
Mapping the American Streetcar Suburb: Comparative Research on the History of Transit Oriented Development Robert Fishman and Conrad Kickert, University of Michigan
In the age of drastically increasing fuel costs, global climate change and the worst financial crisis in a generation, the uncertain position of the American suburban dream prominently features in contemporary scholarly and professional debate among urban planners, designers and architects. Among designers, this debate focuses on future challenges and opportunities, most notably Transit Oriented Development (TOD), which calls the link between between suburban living and automobility into question. While TOD is heralded by many as a key element in a sustainable way forward for suburbia, the history of this planning strategy is often forgotten. This paper aims to link the suburban future to its past by presenting new techniques of morphological research on the American streetcar suburb. Methodologically, the paper focuses on analysis through mapping, illustration and quantitative study. By employing consistent scale and other mapping techniques in all our case studies, we can arrive at a more rigorous socio-spatial comparison of the variety of streetcar suburbs than researchers have hitherto attempted.
A range of 29 case studies created by Taubman College graduate students under our direction will illustrate this variety. As horse-drawn and electric streetcars began to open up a vast expanse of previously inaccessible countryside, a symbiosis between the rapidly expanding streetcar networks and new housing and commercial developments on the urban fringe enabled many Americans to pursue their dream of living in the countryside while maintaining proximity to the vitality and economy of central cities. The depicted streetcar suburbs are compared spatially by cartography that includes current building footprints, open spaces and infrastructure. Three-dimensional sections illustrate the variety of building types that can be found in the various streetcar suburbs, as well as the careful balance of public and private open spaces that constitute the ideal of living in nature. The current physical reality is accompanied by a short history describing the conception and evolution of the case studies, complemented by historic and current photographic material.
1 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
While the characteristics of streetcar suburbs vastly differed between cities as far apart as Boston and San Francisco, their essential formula remains as crucial and relevant today as when they were first conceived. Although these suburbs did represent early examples of the American middle-class separating itself from central city life, society and its challenges, most of them included a surprisingly wide range of incomes and land uses. Moreover, the need to walk to a streetcar line gave each of them the spatial definition and walkability currently lacking in auto- dependent suburbs. The streetcar suburbs presented here demonstrate a balance between town and country, between technology and nature and between privacy and sociability – an equilibrium that contemporary urban designers still strive to achieve.
The Crash: The Collapse of Urban Cycling in the United States Evan Friss, James Madison University
“It seems likely enough just now that some of us who happen to be alive and observant in this year of grace, may come to be regarded with interest by persons still unborn as ancients, who can remember when there were no bicycles, when pavements in cities were still rough, when there were no cinder paths along the country roads, when women almost universally wore long skirts and horses were still almost as common a sight in the streets as human creatures.”1 When the writer for Scribner’s magazine penned these words hailing 1896 as a year defined by the bicycle, the author, like so many of his peers, could never have imagined what was about to happen. Just several years earlier and out of nowhere, bicycles populated American cities. What had been just a few hundred riders slowly grew to a group of a few thousand, before exploding into an army of millions.
American cities in the 1890s stood as monuments to the cyclists’ powerful urban force. The ways in which urban Americans lived in, and perceived, the city changed dramatically. Bicycles, as part of a broader transportation revolution, altered contemporary notions of space and time. For those who flocked to the city for its promises of spectacle, excitement, and constant redevelopment, bicycles served as a tangible reminder of the possibilities unleashed in the age of modernity. City streets were not only filled with bicycles, but owed much of their shape to the very wheels that spun across them. The cycling paths that lined most major cities had been a radical development in the pre-nascent field of urban planning.
Then, just a few years later, again out of nowhere, bicycles disappeared. The cycling city was no more…at least not in the United States. This paper will consider the reasons why cycling failed to maintain its central place within the American city, including causes related to the role of the state, modes of planning, alternative forms of transportation, and political capital. In particular, the paper will seek to understand why cycling in American cities crashed so quickly and permanently, compared to European cities, which, on the whole, managed to more successfully promote and accommodate bicycles within the transportation network.
Pennies, Pavement, and Public Process: The Design and Redesign of Minneapolis Parkways, 1883 to 1980 Heidi Hohmann, Iowa State University
2 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
The scenic parkways of Minneapolis are generally attributed to H.W.S. Cleveland and his 1883 plan for the Minneapolis Park System. However, the Minneapolis parkway system as constituted today differs significantly from Cleveland’s original design. This paper explores how the system was designed and redesigned multiple times, and the way these redesigns reflect changing ideas about the relationships between parks, people, and vehicles in the years between 1883 and 1980.
The paper describes the earliest manifestation of Cleveland’s parkways as a predominantly orthogonal boulevard system in the 1880s, its refinement based on ideas of Warren Manning in 1899, and its extension along natural corridors under park superintendent Theodore Wirth from 1906-1937. It then discusses the system’s major redesign in the 1970s under landscape architect and urban planner Garrett Eckbo. Minneapolis hired Eckbo to re- examine the “purpose of the parkways” and his work helped create a compelling Modernist identity for the parkways, accomplished through the design and implementation of standardized lighting, signage, and details, many of which are still used today. To relieve perceived automobile congestion, Eckbo also proposed a major reorganization of the system’s parkways, changing sectional relationships, adding parking, and perhaps most significantly, creating a primarily unidirectional flow around the park’s signature chain of lakes. Many of these changes were highly controversial at the time, sparking angry citizen protests. As a result, the park board appointed a citizen commission to oversee revisions to the Eckbo plan, heralding a future era of public participation in park board actions. Thus, the Eckbo redesign resulted not only in a new physical character for the parkways, but also in a new--and more open-- park planning process.
While documenting the history of the parkways’ development, the paper also explicates the changing societal perceptions and use of the parkways as the system evolved from a set of loosely linked pleasure drives and transit routes to a dynamic and multimodal recreational network. Through an evaluation of roadway form and cross-section the paper also shows how, in contrast to other 19th-century urban parkways, the Minneapolis system retained its landscape setting by neither embracing nor rejecting the automobile, but rather by consciously and carefully designing and redesigning the relationships between people, park, and vehicles.
The Making of Modern Zoning: Westmount, Canada Raphael Fischler, McGill University
This research project builds on my prior research on the emergence of modern urban planning tools in North America, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Fischler 1993, 1998, 2000, 2007, 2013). One of the key debates in North---American historiography is whether zoning is a European import or an “American” creation. It is often argued that zoning is a German import (e.g., Logan 1976) or at least that it was borrowed from Europe as part of a larger exchange of new policies and instruments between the American and European continents (Rogers 2000). Others have argued that zoning was a local invention and that New York City in particular set a pattern for North America with its 1916 comprehensive zoning ordinance (Toll 1969). My research on Canadian cities shows that truth lies more on the latter side on the debate than on the former, but that New York City cannot be given too much credit either. Montréal and Toronto built their modern land---use regulation systems over time, in a progressive manner. Even though city leaders were in touch with colleagues in
3 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 the US and in Europe, they created a comprehensive system through a steady process of innovation and adaptation, a process of bricolage that can be followed in the numerous municipal bylaws that were adopted in the 19th and 20th centuries (Fischler 2007, 2013).
From my research on the Montréal case, it appears that the wealthier suburbs of Montréal, rather than the central city itself, were at the forefront of the process of innovation in municipal regulation. As was shown for the suburban municipality of Maisonneuve (Linteau 1981), developers of residential and industrial suburbs around Montréal were keen on controlling the long-term use of the land they planned and sold. Montréal’s own system of land-use regulation matured significantly as it incorporated the systems of suburban municipalities that were merged with the central city. In Westmount, too, developers used municipal government in order to create an elaborate system of regulations to ensure that the built environment would correspond to their financial and social aspirations (Colin 1982).
Although New York City is credited for instituting the first modern, comprehensive zoning ordinance on this continent in 1916, my preliminary research shows that Westmount possessed a similar system, albeit at a smaller geographic scale, about ten years earlier. Without borrowing from Germany or other countries, local leaders set up a system that “zoned” the whole municipal territory into different districts and gave each district specific regulations in terms of land uses (activities), building types, building volumes and even architectural features. The purpose of the proposed research is to document Westmount’s pioneering work. From these findings, implications can be drawn for the historiography of urban planning in North America, for instance with respect to the relative importance of local vs. regional or international factors, the motivations of urban elites and the rise of regulation in a liberal state.
Session A2: Twentieth Century Housing and the State Chair: Alexander von Hoffman, Harvard University Comment: Alexander von Hoffman, Harvard University
The Federal Housing Administration: Did It Really Favor the Suburbs? Judge Glock, Rutgers University
There is a near universal consensus among urban historians that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was central in shaping the post--World War II American landscape. Its putative anti--urban bias is used to explain both the rise of white, middle--class suburbs and the decline of increasingly impoverished and increasingly nonwhite central cities. This paper will show that this claim is based on two fundamental misunderstandings. One is the absence of any comparison of FHA mortgages with the rest of the housing market. When this comparison is performed, the result is almost the polar opposite of the one usually posited. The FHA tended to favor multifamily housing relative to single--family, central city developments relative to suburban, and its loans to white and nonwhite households largely mimicked the rest of the market. Second, a singular focus on the FHA’s Section 203 guarantee program for single- -family homes has ignored the myriad of other programs at the FHA, from multifamily rental housing to home repair loans, which disproportionally benefited cities and existing
4 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 neighborhoods and which constituted large portions of all FHA loans by dollar volume. This paper shows that far from creating the contemporary suburban landscape, the FHA struggled vigorously against its rise.
Environment, Behavior, and the Criminalization of Public Housing Kenny Cupers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper explores the development of studies linking environment and behavior during the 1960s and early 1970s and their role in the gradual shift in focus of public housing policy and design from reform and welfare to security and criminality. In explaining the demise of public housing, scholars tend to rely on the idea of a regime shift from the welfare state to private development, often under the vague umbrella of “neoliberalism.” This paper trains a finer lens on this shift by examining the knowledge production which accompanied it. Its focus is on the relationships between housing research, policy, and design in the United States, France, and Britain.
While the growing scrutiny of public housing during the “long sixties” may have been a factor of the more general proliferation of expertise in the postwar period, it was exacerbated by growing public criticism and specific social concerns. In France, sociologists like Madeleine Lemaire and Jean-Claude Chamboredon examined the rise of youth delinquency and segregation in the country’s mass housing estates – many of which were socially and racially mixed at this time. Meanwhile, in the United States, public housing projects were studied by Lee Rainwater and other sociologists as African-American “federal slums.” This was only the tip of the iceberg: many academics, designers, and policy experts poured into government-aided housing areas – infamous ones like Pruitt-Igoe or Sarcelles, but also dozens of others – to study and learn. On both sides of the Atlantic, more than a few of them pointed at the physical environment in search of a cause and a solution. While many French and British observers lamented the purported behavioral effects of inhuman scale and repetitive architecture, in the United States Oscar Newman claimed features of modern design as an almost natural cause for vandalism and robbery. Armed with expertise from existing disciplines like urban sociology but also from newly minted fields like “environment and behavior studies” and “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design” (CPTED), they were particularly influential in shaping future policy. Alice Coleman, a fervent follow of Newman and Margaret Thatcher’s right hand in housing policy, eventually organized the privatization of massive amounts of public housing units, which had suffered from a downward spiral of residential mobility and lack of maintenance. The paper shows how the knowledge produced by social scientists, policy-makers, and designers at this time did not just expose the problematic condition of public housing, but contributed to its ongoing transformation.
The Urban Laboratory: Community Design Centers and Urban Design Education 1960-1980 Susanne Cowan, Washington University
In the 1960s and 70s, as modernist physical planning came under fire, and the civil rights movement and the Great Society led to urban social reform, architecture and planning departments were challenged to rethink their urban design curriculum. In the face of social and professional upheaval, schools questioned how to educate students to address complex urban
5 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 problems in the absence of clear technocratic solutions. In response to the charges that planning had been undemocratic and had been insensitive to the needs of citizens, movements like advocacy planning and participatory design questioned the top down approach to planning, and undermined the legacy of Bauhaus and CIAM inspired design education. By the 1970s, planning programs across the nation had embraced social research and participatory politics as an important avenue within planning. This retreat from formalist planning often entailed a schism between the qualitative and creative aspects of urban planning. In many schools, design centers served as a forum in which to combine the activities of design and research, pedagogy and practice. However by the 1980s many of the design centers had disappeared along with a range of socially oriented urban design courses that had flourished since the late 1960s. This dismantling or atrophy of urban design programs signalled a widening gap between the theoretical and methodological approaches of the planning and architecture fields.
This paper will examine the pedagogical approach to urban design at three schools, University of California at Berkeley, Washington University, and North Carolina State University, Raleigh as a means to study the ways in which the community design centers reflected or shaped each school’s pedagogical approach from the 1960s to 1980s. The paper will show the extent to which these schools shared similar visions of the role of community outreach and research in design pedagogy. Additionally it will search to explain why two of these programs, at Berkeley and Washington University, dramatically scaled back community design work in the 1980s, while NC State Raleigh continued their program. This research will serve both to give historical context to this period of urban design pedagogy, and evaluate what challenges schools face in conducting community based design and planning work.
The Changing Role of National Wide Semi-Public Development Agency in Japan: Focusing on the Shift from Housing Corporation to Urban Renaissance Agency Sayaka Fujii, University of Tsukuba
In Japan, the Japan Housing Corporation (JHC), the national wide public housing and urban development agency, was established in 1954 to cope with the significant shortage of housing in the metropolitan areas after World War II. JHC made significant contributions in provision of affordable housing in urban areas from the 1950s to the 1980s. JHC also played an important role in popularizing new multi-unit housing models. JHC built many mid- and high-rise apartment buildings that had not been so common in Japan before that time. In total, JHC built over 1 million housing units and developed 26,000 ha.
In 1980s, housing shortage was eliminated, and the focus of housing policy shifted towards improvements of housing quality and living environment. In 1990s, Japan’s economic bubble collapsed and Japan slid into a long depression. To promote economic growth, structural reform and deregulation of national government and public agencies were undertaken. In 2004 JHC was reorganized as the Urban Renaissance Agency (UR). With this reform, UR was turned into an Independent Administrative Corporation, a semi-public agency, from a public agency.
Although UR keeps its unique characteristics as one of the largest housing and urban developers in the world, its role is more focused on four fields, urban restructuring, utilization
6 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 of rental housing stock, implementation of suburb development and supports for earthquake disaster reconstruction. In all of these fields, UR reinforces its character as a coordinator among public and private actors.
In this paper, I will discuss how the role of the national semi-public development agency in Japan shifted by comparing the aims and the projects of UR with those of the JHC. Then, I will examine the characteristics of UR by looking at four fields that UR was focusing on. Finally, I would like to discuss the significance of role changing and perspective for future of UR by analyzing UR’s contributions in the earthquake disaster reconstruction after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011.
Session A3: Thinking Globally and Planning Locally: Mid-Twentieth Century Planners on Three Continents Chair: Christopher Klemek, George Washington University Comment: Christopher Klemek, George Washington University
The Neighborhood Unit in Coventry and Rotterdam: How Two Blitzed Cities Related to a Planning Fad, 1930-1950 Stefan Couperus, Utrecht University
This paper will address the reception of the travelling planning notion of ‘the neighbourhood unit’ in the context of urban destruction and reconstruction of two blitzed European cities: Rotterdam and Coventry.
During the interwar period, a variety of conceptions of a small scale, spatially confined urban social unit converged into the widely proclaimed urban planning notion of ‘the neighbourhood’. Whether referred to as the ‘neighbourhood unit’ – in the Anglophone world, or as ‘l’unité de voisinage’ in the Francophone countries, since the publication and Atlantic distribution of the New York plan of 1929 the ‘neighbourhood’ became a key notion which combined the perceived imperatives of social, spatial, political and economic order in the urban context. Through various channels and (professional) networks, the neighbourhood unit traversed the Atlantic and the European continent from the 1930s onward.
However, the reception of ‘the neighbourhood’, as a socio-spatial entity amenable to urban planning, differed significantly. Whereas in Britain clusters of neighbourhoods were envisaged as the constituents of the post-war city in many reconstruction schemes (Manchester, London, Coventry, Plymouth, Hull, Portsmouth), in France (e.g. Le Havre, Brest) and the Netherlands (e.g. Rotterdam, Nijmegen) reconstruction plans did not feature them at all – these plans still revolved around the idea of the concentric city which inner circles accommodated most (public) facilities for the urbanites. Here, the neighbourhood unit later became part of plans and planning practices in the 1950s.
Against the background of the urgencies provoked by the blitzes, this paper will look at the particular local reception and reification–and subsequent (gradual) adoption in urban governance practices–of the ‘neighbourhoud unit’ in Rotterdam and Coventry. It deals with the
7 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 arrival of a plan rather than with a plan’s transnational travel. Particular attention will be paid to existing and prevailing local bodies of knowledge about urban order, the specificity of wartime’s alleged windows of opportunity with regard to urban reform, local traditions of transnational exchange and orientation, and the politico- administrative cultures of crisis, occupation and reconstruction in which an ‘Americanized’ notion of the neighbourhood permeated debates of urban malleability.
Searching for Self-Government: Models of Municipalism in Late Colonial Bombay Nikhil Rao, Wellesley College
Between 1950 and 1956, the expanding city of Bombay annexed large portions of the neighbouring island of Salsette to create a municipal entity called Greater Bombay under the authority of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Bombay. As a result, Bombay swallowed up 86 villages and small towns in Salsette and expanded from 25 to 175 square miles. To the slight extent that it has been studied, the expansion-by-annexure of Bombay has been assumed to be the outcome of a smooth and inevitable trajectory towards a single larger municipal body. Yet in fact the annexure was a contested and controversial affair, with many residents of the various local self-government bodies of Salsette resentful at the loss of their sovereignty.
This paper examines some debates concerning the expansion of Bombay and suggests that there existed an impressive and hitherto unexamined circulation of ideas about local self- government in late colonial Bombay. Residents of Salsette looked to examples of urban growth in other parts of the world to find alternative models for urban administrative expansion that did not necessarily entail annexure and loss of sovereignty. In particular, the London County Council and the Zweckverband fuer Gross Berlin were discussed as attractive alternatives to expansion- by-annexure. These bodies entailed administrative unions of a large number of municipal bodies with a more federal structure and without an absolute loss of sovereignty for any local body. Through a discussion of these debates over models for urban expansion, this paper situates Bombay and its residents within a broader conversation about how cities expand and how they should be governed.
Suspect Properties: The International Origins of the Liquidation of Japanese-Canadian Property, WWII Jordan Stanger-Ross, University of Victoria, British Columbia
When people of Japanese origins were uprooted from British Columbia’s west coast during World War II, they were assured that Canada’s Custodian of Enemy Property would “protect and preserve” their homes and farms for the duration of the war. By the spring of 1943, however, the government was hastily selling all Japanese-Canadian property, including almost 2,000 parcels of real estate. What had changed? Were the assurances of 1942 deliberate lies? Was the liquidation of property part of an attempt by racist British Columbians to rid the province of “the Japanese,” once and for all?
The answers to these questions lie in the records of a municipal body never before connected with this history: Vancouver’s Town Planning Commission. Inspired by international discussions of the importance of federal intervention into areas of concentrated urban blight, the Town Planning Commission began, in the summer of 1942, a campaign to pressure the Canadian
8 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 government to liquidate real estate in Japanese-Canadian “slum” neighbourhoods. Drawing upon ideas circulating at major planning conferences, figures such as Frank E. Buck, a distinguished UBC professor and a leading Vancouver planner, envisioned the historic Japanese-Canadian neighbourhood in Vancouver remade as centrally planned affordable housing or a site of modern industry. Planners such as Buck, and concepts such as the “slum,” provided the federal government with a rationale for the liquidation of Japanese-Canadian owned property. This influence explains the peculiarities of the liquidation policy, which drew upon logics absent from the other wartime policies of which it was a part, avoided expressions of overt race hatred, and dispossessed the Japanese even as it affirmed their Canadian citizenship.
Session A4: Thinking Like A Publisher Chair: Timothy Gilfoyle, Loyola University Chicago
Timothy Mennel, The University of Chicago Press
Robert Lockhart, University of Pennsylvania Press
Michael McGandy, Cornell University Press
Pieter Martin, University of Minnesota Press
Philip Leventhal, Columbia University Press
Session A5: Infrastructure as Utopian Planning Chair: James Buckley, University of California at Berkeley Comment: James Buckley, University of California at Berkeley
Pipe Dreams: The Aspirations of Infrastructure in 19th and 20th Century Utopian Urban Plans Lily Baum Pollans, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The anthropologist Susan Leigh Star has argued that to “study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have)…you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power.” Exploring infrastructure in the terms of those who invent it, build it, and operate it, she argues, reveals it as a “part of human organization…as problematic as any other.” Heeding Star’s call, this paper claims infrastructure into the social realm through a critical exploration of the role of infrastructure in late 19th and early 20th century utopian city plans, specifically Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City and Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow and its Planning.
While these three plans have been explored and re--explored, appropriated, misunderstood, and rediscovered continually over the last century, little if any attention has been paid to the treatment of infrastructure as it relates to each plan’s unique social vision. But, as might be expected, each plan’s infrastructural proposal is laden with social freight. By inverting
9 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 these imagined cities and reading them through their infrastructures, I find that the work done by these critical systems does not always support the reform agendas of the planners. Indeed, in the case of Corbusier and Wright, the infrastructural proposals stand in direct contradiction to their social reform agendas.
I also find that certain infrastructures are privileged over others, through more elaborate discussion and detail. Because the physical forms of these utopias have been constructed all over the world in support of many different social regimes, not only the form and architectural style, but also the judgments about which infrastructures merited attention, which did not, and how they were incorporated have continued repercussions for urban form and urban planning.
“Not Quite So Freely as Air”: Comparative Social Visions of Rural Electrification in the United States and Canada Abby Spinak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In 1905, shortly before taking office as Premier of Ontario, James Pliny Whitney argued that electricity was a public good and should be “as free as air;” thirty years later, Morris L. Cooke, the first Administrator of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration, told the country that electricity, as an engine of industrial growth, should flow “not quite so freely as air, of course, but almost as freely as tap water.” The evolution of this quote as it traveled from Canada to the U.S. illuminates an important social history on the perceived role of electrification in nation building and economic development. By the mid--twentieth century, it had become apparent that government intervention was needed in the power industry to extend the benefits of electricity widely and equitably. However, the array of public goods electrification was believed to provide differed across borders, as did definitions of universal coverage. These varying interests in electrification set the stage for rich international debates about the role of government in electricity distribution and regulation of the private power sector.
This paper is a comparative political history of the social role of electricity in the United States and the province of Ontario, Canada. Specifically, the paper looks at the influence of Ontario’s public hydroelectric power on the design of rural electrification policy in the Unites States. From the beginning of federal interest in rural electrification, U.S. policymakers used Ontario’s public power as a yardstick, conducting studies on neighboring border towns and using Canadian statistics to combat the growing political influence of the for--profit power sector. Public power was less feasible in the U.S. than in Ontario, however; in contradistinction to a public good, electricity in the U.S. came to be envisioned as a low--cost commodity that would encourage enhanced production and bring rural communities more fully into a market economy. The political negotiations that constructed electrification as a national/provincial interest resulted in different kinds of institutions and patterns of distribution in Ontario and the U.S., with consequences for rural development. This comparative history furthermore suggests a counterfactual for questioning how electricity provision in the U.S. could have been designed for different social and environmental ends.
Data for this paper come from the U.S. National Archives, the Ontario Hydro Archives, the Library and Archives Canada, correspondence between key personnel on both projects, and newspaper records.
10 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Connect Me First: A Study of the Impact of Race on Rural and Urban Electrification in the United States Christopher M. Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In 1930, roughly 2 percent of Arkansas farms had electricity and by 1950 over 65 percent of the state’s farms were electrified. The state experienced a significant growth in electric cooperatives during this period, with the number of incorporated cooperatives increasing from three in 1937 to eighteen by 1945. Both the public and private electric utilities understood that electrifying farms could raise farm income. Given the history of racial injustice in the state and the country, it is appropriate to consider whether or not blacks and whites alike enjoyed the benefits of electrification. Discrimination in New Deal programs made circumstances even more dire for black Arkansans. Yet, very little is known about the story of blacks and electrification in Arkansas. This paper examines the role that race played in early electrification of the state of Arkansas by examining the period between 1930 and 1945. Though different utilities had various metrics for customer service based on technical and economic viability measures, often these choices were designed and/or implemented in ways that enabled discrimination on the basis of race alone. At the core of the work is the following question: In what ways did public and private utilities discriminate on the basis of race? Planners have not grappled extensively with how people of color were ignored or neglected when it came to expansion of electricity services. Revisiting the history of electrification in the U.S. through the lens of race will extend our understanding of: 1. the impact of race on technological and economic development 2. the social construction of technology 3. the role of planning in technology deployment
This work will contribute to critical perspectives in planning that provide important contrast to the idea that technological development has remained neutral on racial issues. The paper will also discuss how historical perspectives on discrimination in electricity distribution can illuminate potential inequities in current expansion of renewable generation and energy efficiency.
Data for this paper come from the Central Arkansas Library System, the University of Arkansas Libraries, the Arkansas Historical Association, the University of Arkansas Museum Collections, the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas and newspaper records.
Managing Utopia with Utopic Tech-Fixes: Desalinization and the Luxury Tourist Resorts of Los Cabos, Mexico Melissa Haeffner, Colorado State University
In 1973, the Mexican tourism promotion agency, FONATUR (Fondo Nacional de Formento de Turismo), chose Los Cabos in Baja California Sur as one of five tourism investment projects. Since then, large--scale luxury resorts have been developed using primarily federal funds, making hotels responsible for only federal taxes. Without legal authority to levy local taxes, the municipality has only been able to collect one--time payments for building permits and annual property taxes. By Mexican law, however, the
11 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 municipal government has been responsible for servicing the surrounding residential area, including the rapid population growth stimulated by tourism development. For example, each new hotel room in Los Cabos has attracted an estimated 19.1 migrants to the area.
This paper examines forty years of flows of water, people, and investments to the Los Cabos municipality of Baja California Sur, the most arid state in Mexico. By the 1990s, individual hotels were able to circumvent a reliance on freshwater through the installation of private desalinization plants. Meanwhile, the municipality of Los Cabos has relied exclusively on the San Jose aquifer, leading to over--exploitation and exposure to drought and hurricane risk. Within the last few years, the city has opened the nation’s first public desalinization plant to also reduce their dependence on freshwater resources, but demand has already exceeded supply and plans for a second are in progress. Because the tourism sector had independent means to water resources, efforts to involve the tourism industry in municipal water projects have often met with strong opposition.
This paper builds on what Stephen Graham calls “unbundling” – the segregation of previously standardized public utilities into private provisions that tend to create enclaves within the periphery. Through this study, I examine how a parallel attempt to “unbundle” natural resource dependency and risk through techno--fixes like desalinization was made in Los Cabos, and how this process may have also exacerbated uneven development within the municipality. This paper further reviews how the sustainable development and alternative tourism communities have re--conceived the history of tourism development in Los Cabos in resistance to both processes of “unbundling.”
Data for this paper come from interviews with public officials in urban resource management, key personnel in the Baja California Sur tourism industry, and economic professors at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur (UABCS).
Session A6: Trials and Tribulations of Airport Planning in Late Twentieth Century North America Chair: Zachary Schrag, George Mason University Comment: Janet Bednarek, University of Dayton
Questioning the Growth Imperative: The Decision Not to Build a New International Airport in Metropolitan Boston Owen Gutfreund, Hunter College
How to adapt a city to the jet age? After considering multiple proposals to build a modern new mega-sized jetport in the countryside at the edge of the metropolitan area, Boston’s civic leaders instead decided to renew their commitment to retaining and enhancing Logan Airport, located right next to downtown, at the heart of the metropolitan area. This was a stark contrast to decisions made in many cities across the United States, where business and political elites pushed the construction of huge new suburban jetports. In most cities, these projects were seen as the requisite infrastructure for sustained economic growth and development, a necessary means of remaining competitive and relevant in a new air-travel era. This paper will explore the
12 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 options considered in Boston as they wrestled with this crucial issue, the decision-making process and related discourse, the eventual outcome, and the subsequent impact on metropolitan growth and development patterns.
Local Transit/Global Airport: Mismatch at Idlewild Nicholas Bloom, New York Institute of Technology
Idlewild Airport (today’s JFK International) was to be the leading edge of New York’s future of air urbanism: a carefully planned urban addition that was so modern and vast that it could prosper for decades to come. The bold vision on display in the 1950s, however, masked critical omissions. While the designers made provisions for hotel rooms, shopping, highways, parking, and even shopping, absent from the airport was a direct connection to New York’s vast mass transportation system that still ranked as the world’s single greatest piece of urban infrastructure. It was the subway, in particular, that gave New York the feverish activity and density that set it off from other American cities. Yet the new airport, by design, divorced itself from the aging and dizzying metropolis nearby. Robert Moses is usually blamed for failing to make the subway/airport link on the Van Wyck Parkway, but the failure must be more widely shared.
The airport, according to the Port Authority in the 1940s and 1950s (the airport’s manager), would escape the city’s congestion not only by throwing planes up over the urban chaos, but by sorting its mostly upper-class passengers into automobiles and shuttle buses on high-speed expressways. At many points, and with just a little effort, the airport could have been neatly plugged into the subway or commuter rail system (and many called for such a link), but it took over a half century to build a connection (known as AirTrain) from airport to the city’s transit network. Many ideas came and went over the decades as resistance from administrators, airlines, and surrounding neighborhoods prevented the creation of an effective mass transit link. The unprecedented success of the AirTrain service, that finally linked Terminals and mass transit in 2003, raises important questions about the path not taken at JFK.
The long term consequences of the failure to develop mass transit connections had major consequences for JFK. The traffic jams that clogged roads inside and outside of the airport made JFK a less attractive hub for airlines and travelers which, in turn, contributed to JFK’s declining global importance. Port Authority leadership of the 1940s and 1950s had promoted an unrealistic narrative: that designers and promoters could pioneer and sustain a dominant international transportation hub in the middle of what was already one of the most congested cities in the world . . . without mass transit.
Playing Catch-Up to Growth: Problems of Access at Toronto International Airport, 1968-1975 Bret Edwards, University of Toronto
My proposed paper surveys emerging public challenges in accessing Toronto International Airport (now Lester B. Pearson International Airport) during the late 1960s and early 1970s and the measures taken by the federal government and urban planners in response. It outlines how the form and function of the built environment in and around Toronto International shaped problems
13 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 of access and was subsequently shaped by solutions to these problems. As commercial air travel boomed in this period and Toronto received a growing number of transcontinental and transoceanic flights, particular spatial stresses were imposed on Toronto International. The increase in air passengers far outpaced the growth of the airport itself, creating a perfect storm that generated particular planning pressures as the travelling public struggled to access and navigate the airport.
I argue that Toronto International’s lack of proximity to the urban core and a spatial and infrastructural deficit at the airport constituted the primary culprits for these problems of access. In all respects, air travel’s promise of greater mobility was betrayed by the experience of actually getting to Toronto International. In particular, cars were stymied by inadequate access roads and a lack of parking space, among other things. What this revealed was an airport landscape at Toronto International that was not in harmony with the character and logic of the broader postwar built environment that was increasingly aligned with the interests of the automobile and its promise of unfettered, individual mobility. The age of jet travel thus presented new problems for airport planners and politicians as the automobile, in essence, met resistance in trying to access and traverse airport space at Toronto International.
As a result, a new discourse of air travel as a public inconvenience slowly emerged, galvanizing the federal government and airport planners to modernize Toronto International and eliminate its spatial and infrastructural deficit. I contend that these efforts ultimately provided the recipe for the airport’s emergence as an influential global hub, transforming the surrounding built landscape into a dense economic corridor and helping turn Toronto itself into a political and economically influential global city.
Session A7: Roundtable: The Physical City: Social Change and Urban Space Session I: Historical Narratives of Social Change and Urban Space Moderator: Greg Hise, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
The Challenges of Weaving Together Narratives of Social Change and Urban Space Joseph Heathcott, The New School
For this roundtable, I will comment on the difficulty of weaving together critical historical narratives of urban space and social change. This difficulty, I argue, is why the literature on these intersections remains relatively underdeveloped. There is excellent scholarly work on the historical development of the physical city, abundant studies of social movements and social change over time, and a rich and extensive literature on urban spatial theory. The challenge for bringing these scholarly arenas together stems from their roots in different disciplinary and epistemological approaches, as well as from the fact that the successful cases are often scattered across different fields and subdisciplines. I will recommend several scholarly works that achieve this goal and explain the reasons for their success.
Taking Land to Make the City, Comparing Baltimore and San Francisco Mary P. Ryan, Johns Hopkins University
14 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
My project "Taking the Land to Make the City” is, in the mode of Lefebvre, a comparative case study of the production of urban space. I offer this exploration of two very different cities, one incorporated just after the American Revolution (Baltimore) and the other founded in the wake of Mexican independence (San Francisco), as a contribution to a conversation about the emancipatory politics that might be found in such urban spaces, as streets, squares and plazas.
Lefebvre, Harvey, and Suburban Uprisings Dianne Harris, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In the preface to his recently published book, Rebel Cities, David Harvey wrote the following passage: “So let us agree: The idea of the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascinations and fads…It primarily rises up from the streets, out from the neighborhoods, as a cry for help and sustenance by pressed peoples in desperate times” (xiii). For Harvey as for Henri Lefebvre whose work has formed the foundational background for Harvey’s work over multiple decades, social movements are necessarily urban, the city the requisite site of activism, revolution. Despite recent studies that reveal the complexity of suburban life and history, Harvey persists in repeating a received critique of U.S. suburbia that was forged by postwar cultural critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Lewis Mumford, David Reisman, and John Keats. Building on Lefebvre’s urban spatial theories and denouncing suburbs as “incoherent, bland, and monotonous” tracts that increase “individualistic isolation, anxiety, and neurosis” (14), Harvey rejects the notion that suburban spaces can support or create the spatial framework necessary for substantial social change. But is Lefebvre's (and by extension Harvey’s) necessarily an exclusively urban argument? Though relatively unexamined, histories of suburban activism demonstrate that suburban spaces have frequently supported various kinds of social change through spatially-oriented actions that are experienced and chronicled as “riots.” From the streets of Skokie to the golf course of Peekskill to the neighborhoods and shopping centers of Levittown, Pennsylvania, suburban spaces have served as the locus for various kinds of social uprisings. How do the spaces of suburbia shape specific forms of activism? How might we reconsider Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s spatial theories to accommodate a broader and perhaps more accurate view of social activism within a range of spaces that exist on urban peripheries?
The Politics of Play in Oakland Marta Gutman, City College of New York
My contribution, “The Politics of Play in Oakland,” applies Lefebvre’s insights to the playground movement in California during the Progressive Era. This story shows that emancipatory politics are grounded in battles that take place in real time and about real spaces: in the first decade of the twentieth century clubwomen in Oakland fought conservative politicians and greedy real estate developers as they removed land from the capitalist market place and set up playgrounds on them. Their spatial activism translated into concrete political victories for women, victories that not only ensured a place in electoral politics for women but also more open space for children. As it became clear that women would win the franchise in California, they won a place in Oakland’s municipal government. By 1910, the Playground Commission, dominated by women, ran playgrounds that were bona fide public places: publicly owned and publicly operated for all city children, these spaces that showed all kids had a right to childhood
15 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 because they had a place to play.
Session A8: The Aesthetic Infrastructure of Suburbia Chair: David Smiley, Columbia University Comment: David Smiley, Columbia University
Keeping Up Appearances Penelope Dean, University of Illinois at Chicago
In his enormously popular book Future Shock (1970), the best-selling if often dismissed futurologist Alvin Toffler was one of the first to understand the concept of lifestyle as a self- designed “super-product,” a product not limited to the consumption of objects but rather something individuals produced from a mosaic of components. For Toffler, the production of lifestyles—or in his terms the “identification with this or that subcult”—was highly involving, ranging from the selection of aesthetic issues like color, harmony and form, to social participation in “live environments” through conformity, program, and role-playing. Contrary to negative accounts of the “designed subject,” Toffler understood that a subject might maintain his or her lifestyles precisely via the designing-activities they undertake. Designing one’s lifestyle entailed the political act of choice.
Nowhere do lifestyles entail more design participation than those carried out behind the suburban gates of southern California. Here, the perpetual upkeep of spotless terracotta, crisp whitewash, lush lawns, and gleaning driveways, not only produce a clean and timeless picture of an American suburb, but also expose how the construction of collective lifestyles are entirely dependent on the self-selected design-activities of residents. Indeed, for such environments to remain self-similar in appearance, inhabitants must perform perpetual design maintenance. This essay will look at bureaucratic minutia—laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to appearance management—and argue, after Toffler, that contemporary suburban aesthetics are less a function of design prescription than they are of voluntary design conscription. Recuperating the denigrated nineteenth century concept of “total design” to unpack the lifestyle politics of enclave aesthetics, the essay will align suburban “looks” within a fully generalized design culture and insist that when it comes to keeping up appearances, matters of aesthetics are inseparable from those of inhabitation.
Banality and Beauty: Towards and Aesthetic of the “Hi-Way Culture” Gabrielle Esperdy, New Jersey Institute of Technology
This paper examines the work of visual artists who, beginning in the 1960s, turned a critical eye to the American suburb and suburban America, choosing the commercial landscape, in particular, as significant, and signifying subject. From shopping centers to strip malls, from gas stations to drive-in restaurants, the morphologies of the expanding highway metropolis had an irresistible appeal to a generation of artists who matured into the booming consumer culture of the post-war decades. For these painters and photographers, the sprawling territory of the car was a landscape as distinctly American as the majestic natural scenery of the northeast and the far west. What the Adirondacks and the Rockies were to the generation of Thomas Cole and Albert
16 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Bierstadt, McDonald’s and Mobil were to the generation of Ed Ruscha and Allan D’Arcangelo.
D’Arcangelo’s U.S. Highway 1 paintings (beginning 1962) depicted the commercial spine of the eastern seaboard as a continuum of signage, scenery, and infrastructure predicated on the mobilized vision of the driver behind the wheel. On the opposite coast, Ruscha’s Standard Service series (beginning 1963), and books like Twenty-six Gasoline Stations and Thirty-Four Parking Lots, reflected not only the laid-back cool of the L.A. School, but the startling transformation of the physical form of Southern California in the decades after World War II. Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places project (1973-81), produced during a decade of cross-country road trips, captured the essence of all the commercial landscapes in between. Even projects better known for their iconic depictions of residential subdivisions, like Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1973) or Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1965-66) include some aspects of the commercial strip as their makers literally and conceptually constructed a suburban imaginary. More recently, Catherine Opie’s Mini-Mall series (1997-98) and Paho Mann’s Re-inhabited Circle K series (2004 and later) indicate that what critic Lawrence Alloway dubbed “hi-way culture” remains relevant for contemporary artists.
Writing in Arts Magazine in 1967, Alloway identified art that examined the places and spaces of the American highway as a key post-war “expansion of iconography.” This was important not simply because it offered an aesthetic alternative to heroic abstraction, but because it served to make visible a vast and richly “folkloric” domain whose ubiquity meant that it was all but ignored, “except by those who don’t like it.” For Alloway, being for or against the highway was beside the point because he believed that, for better or worse, it represented “the stylistic diversity of the twentieth-century city.” This paper uses Alloway’s examination of hi-way culture as a starting point for assessing the art it inspired. The intention is not to survey this work, much of which is well known, or to interpret it monolithically. Instead, the paper will relate this body of work to a growing cultural awareness (along with a burgeoning critical discourse), that the buildings and landscapes produced by commerce and the car had become the genius loci of America.
Beneath the Refinery’s Glow: Tony Smith and the Art of Suburban Infrastructure David Salomon, University at Buffalo
What insights into the history of suburbia are gained from an examination of Minimalist and Conceptual Art? This paper will argue that these movements were surprisingly - and directly - influenced by the suburban landscape of the 1950s and 60s. It will also show how artists such as Tony Smith and Robert Smithson, by distilling the sensibility specific to that time and place (i.e., New Jersey), created an alternative model for understanding suburban space. Finally, it will ask if their work can shed light on the ever-changing relationship between infrastructure, industry and the environment that other artifacts and archives from that era might not.
For example, it has been argued that Minimalism was born on the unfinished lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike. On a “dark night” in 1951, Tony Smith - a New Jersey native, college drop- out, drinking buddy of Tennessee Williams and Jackson Pollack, former assistant to Frank Lloyd Wright, practicing architect, teacher, painter, sculptor and commuter - found himself in a car with three of his students from The Cooper Union riding down the soon-to-be-opened highway. Tipped
17 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 off as to how to sneak onto the road, they made the trip from the “the Meadows” to New Brunswick (from Exit 16 to Exit 9 for those familiar) under the cover of night. With no reflectors, painted lane markers or guard rails to direct them, they were guided only by their headlights and the glow from the adjacent refineries.
As Smith would later recount, the drive was nothing less than thrilling and its effect nothing less than enlightening. He noted that the ride challenged the conventional categories of painting, sculpture and architecture, and raised serious questions regarding the division between artistic and everyday events. The effect was clearly “artificial” yet not quite “art.” It could neither be reduced to an idea to be understood nor to an image to be reflected upon. It was something one had “to experience” in real time and space to be made sense of.
In short, Smith’s midnight ride embodied a new type of space and new kind of aesthetic encounter. For fellow artist and native New Jerseyan Robert Smithson, such “desolate but exquisite” environments could only be “brought into focus by a strict condition of perception, rather than any expressive or emotive means.” In other words, to document, understand, and make sense of the world they found themselves in (i.e., the inner and outer suburbs of New York) required a new set of aesthetic practices and products.
Today the suburban experience is not often described as exhilarating or enlightening. Yet the art inspired by it remains so. Even when taken out of its historical context, it continues to embody the sensibility the artists originally tried to capture. In this way it performs, not just represents, the era in which they were produced. How might the history or suburbia be retold through such objects? What does the presence of this still palpable aesthetic enable us to learn about the past? And specifically, what can the story of Smith’s midnight ride and his subsequent sculptures, especially Smoke (1969) and Smog (1973), tell us about the environments and histories of that era?
The Aesthetics of Property Values: How Suburban Landscape Design Stabilizes Investments Sara Stevens, Rice University
J.C. Nichols was a developer of upper-middle class subdivisions in early 20th century Kansas City. Essentially, he built and sold suburban infrastructure: he did not construct houses, turnkey- style, but laid roads, buried water and sewer lines, subdivided land into lots, and, as is best known, wrote the deed restrictions that determined the outlines of all future construction. As subterranean and contractual as much of his work was, though, it also had a decidedly aesthetic component. Unlike most developers at the time, Nichols hired landscape architects to lay out his subdivisions and to design public green spaces on medians, esplanades, and other remnant spots of vegetation. Hardly large enough to qualify as park spaces, these enhancements were in some sense eye candy, decorated with statuary and fountains, but Nichols saw them as much more.
This paper will argue that Nichols believed the aesthetics of bird baths and shrubbery bolstered property values. Nichols did not see his investments in plant material as a sales tool for moving empty lots as much as he saw them as an infrastructure that would bring long-term dividends. In this way, leftover spaces gained productive value, signaling as well as ensuring through their aesthetics the high value of surrounding properties. This piece of leafy suburban
18 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 infrastructure was but another component of Nichols’ system of legal and economic standardizations aimed at producing steady property values for his purchasers, insulating them from the dangers of investing in real estate, what he called “unstable merchandise.”
Session A9: Rethinking Renaissance: Planning Pittsburgh since 1945, Part I Chair: Ted Muller, University of Pittsburgh Comment: Jon Teaford, Purdue University
Fantasy Meets Reality: The Pittsburgh Renaissance and Urban Utopias Mariel Isaacson, CUNY Graduate Center
In 1939, Americans eager for distractions from a long, sapping depression flocked to a World’s Fair that promised a future without toil. Utopian models of cities free of pollution, traffic, and blight occupied central locations within the fairgrounds. These designers drew their city plans on a blank slate—a geography that did not flood, had no physical obstacles, and never endangered the built environment—whereas “Pittsburgh Renaissance” planners in the 1940s had to rebuild an aging, ailing city while fighting an uncooperative geography and an unpredictable political will. The Pittsburgh Renaissance had to scrub the city clean before it could consider the fantasies of popular urban models, but doing so required citywide cooperation and sacrifice. The 1930s utopian plans promised easy solutions to the most pressing problems of the moment, but real life plans needed to secure financing and produce satisfactory results quickly without alienating voters. The Pittsburgh Renaissance had to build a utopia out of a soot--blackened, flood--soaked, congested reality.
Visualizing Urban Renewal: Conflicting Visuals and Visions of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1943-1961 Laura Grantmyre, University of Pittsburgh
Visual representations of the Lower Hill District created by Pittsburgh’s redevelopment coalition and by neighborhood insiders draw out the conflicting ways redevelopers and residents understood older neighborhoods and their redevelopment. The maps and photographs created by the city’s redevelopment coalition documented the Lower Hill’s built environment—its older housing stock, densely built--up blocks, and intermixture of residences and businesses—as definitive examples of blight that threatened downtown’s economic health. Models and architectural sketches of the Civic Arena, the jewel of the Lower Hill’s redevelopment plan, promised to wipe away blight and renew the city. Redevelopers distributed their imagery through brochures and the city’s daily press. Framed by captions labeling the Lower Hill “blight” and the Civic Arena a “wonder of the modern world” these images sold the public on redevelopment. Lower Hill insiders, most notably the neighborhood’s African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and Courier photographer and neighborhood portraitist, Charles “Teenie” Harris, envisioned the Lower Hill and its redevelopment differently. Harris and the Courier supported redevelopment, but their visual coverage celebrated the Lower Hill’s history and pictured residents enjoying better housing as redevelopment’s ultimate ambition. My paper examines how visuals illuminate the differences between redevelopers’ and neighborhood insiders’ perceptions of the Lower Hill
19 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 and redevelopment’s primary objectives. These differences explain whythe Courier and many Hill District residents reacted with disappointment and protest when the Civic Arena replaced the Lower Hill in 1961.
Red Scares and Renaissance Patrick Vitale, University of Toronto
This paper considers the relationship between red scares and Pittsburgh’s Renaissance. Rather than rewrite the well--documented history of red scares in Pittsburgh, I offer a new interpretation. Red scares were part of the overall effort to remake the Pittsburgh region as a place safe for capitalism. Just as city leaders sought to clear the city’s air, dam its rivers, and bulldoze its slums, so too did they attempt to extinguish the city’s long history as a center of radical organizing and culture. They did so in order to create an image of the city as a place renewed for the needs of post--war industry and science. Pittsburgh’s political and business elite framed the Pittsburgh Renaissance, in part, as a response to the threat of communism. They used local skirmishes against accused communists to help Pittsburghers learn to identify as metropolitan and national subjects during the Cold War.
Session A10: Roundtable: Curating the City: Place Making Through Mobile Publishing Chair: J. Mark Souther, Cleveland State University Comment: Audience
This roundtable focuses on Curatescape, an open-source, standards-based mobile publishing tool developed by the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University that enables one to curate a neighborhood or an entire metropolitan area through interpretive text, historical and contemporary photos, oral history clips, and short documentary films with a modest investment of funds, offering virtually unlimited possibilities for engaging communities in place-making. The session will introduce Cleveland Historical, the pilot mobile app that launched Curatescape, as well as two additional mobile apps built on Curatescape: Baltimore Heritage and New Orleans Historical, before turning to an open discussion about best practices and next steps.
Piloting the Curatescape Platform: The Cleveland Historical Mobile App J. Mark Souther, Cleveland State University
Building Digital (and Traditional!) Tours of Baltimore’s Historic Buildings & Neighborhoods Eli Pousson, Baltimore Heritage Inc.
Streaming History in the Street: Creating Mobile Audiences for Documentary Film Michael Mizell-Nelson, University of New Orleans
PAPER SESSION B
Session B1: Planning for Complexity in the Postwar World
20 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Chair: Dianne Harris, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Comment: Audience
The Discourse of Photography and Urban Renewal in the American City: The Planning Proposals of Kevin Lynch and Mildred Mead to Resolve the Urban Crisis Wes Aelbrecht, University College of London
Photographs were crucial to urban renewal programmes in American cities of the fifties and sixties. They were published in urban studies books and governmental planning publications, hung on exhibition panels in public libraries and included in Mayor’s public presentations. Photography’s impact on the debates and policies of urban renewal, however, is not reflected in archives or academic research. What we can observe instead is a growing split between photography and urban renewal by its classification into a separate archive, the photographic archive. Photographs stored in boxes have become mute symbols of a past no longer visible, disconnected from its conditions of production. In this presentation I want to demonstrate that photography played a fundamental and challenging role in those initial decades of urban renewal. I will argue that photography enabled the transgression of existing boundaries of the architectural and urban planning discipline, both in their newly proposed methods of investigation and in the proposals made to remake the city.
As proof of photography’s role in urban renewal I will present two photographic collections: the photographic collection of Nishan Bichajian used for a research project – The Perceptual Form of the City (1954-59) – undertaken by Kevin Lynch and György Kepes, and the photographic collection of the neglected Chicago photographer Mildred Mead (1948-62). By bringing together and comparing two figures that have never been presented together, two ways of using photography can be discussed. Each sheds light on the other as both were using photography to investigate and create arguments for intervention to resolve the urban crisis. In Bichajian’s case, photography was used by Lynch and Kepes to demonstrate the importance of urban legibility, while in Mead’s case, photography was used by the planning department and authorities to map blighted areas, and gather support for demolition and construction of architectural environments with modernist features.
The presentation will show how a discourse of urban renewal has been constructed around Mead’s and Bichajian’s images by using original research material from fieldwork in the US. This material will range from archival documents of Lynch’s study in the archive at MIT in Boston and The Rockefeller Foundation in NY (the main private funder of Lynch’s research); archival research and analyses of the different archives where Mead’s images are held; oral historical accounts of key proponents in and around the urban discourse; analyses of the spaces of representation of Lynch’s and Mead’s work.
Through this analysis, it will become clear that urban and architectural studies were only able to transgress the boundaries of their discipline by their use of photography. Specifically, it was photography that allowed planners and the public to envision and think the impossible, that is, to imagine the city as an ordered environment.
21 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
An American Planner in India: Albert Mayer’s Post-War Planning for Inner Democratization in Indian Villages from 1946-1957 Laurel A. Harbin, University of Florida
During the Second World War, U.S. architect and new town planner Albert Mayer served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructing air fields in Southeast Asia. This experience offered Mayer professional practice as a Lieutenant Colonel, and granted him access and keen insight into a foreign culture and way of life that profoundly impacted the scope of his practice as a planner for the rest of his life.
In the third and final year of Mayer's U.S. Army Corps of Engineers duty, he was introduced to India’s preeminent political leader Jawaharlal Nehru, and the two men conspired to drastically improve the conditions and outlook for the millions of villagers affected by India’s rise to independence. Mayer's implementation of the pilot project for community development in Northern India beginning in 1946, was accompanied by a surge of U.S. bilateral aid to agricultural extension programs to Indian villages. U.S. bilateral aid has since become synonymous with U.S. foreign policy aims during the Cold War era. Mayer’s work on the pilot project for community development in Uttar Pradesh, India, and his involvement in city planning at Chandigarh, Faridabad, and New Delhi, place his work at a poignant crossroads of U.S. foreign assistance in the developing world following the Second World War.
This paper identifies Mayer’s involvement in city and regional planning schemes in India between 1946 and 1957, and the role these works played as part of a broader foreign policy objective of the United States during the Cold War era. As this paper will point out, much of Mayer’s work in India precluded formalized U.S. foreign assistance in India, and in many ways laid the groundwork for the establishment of vested interests by the U.S. Government, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s. By highlighting Mayer’s role in the establishment of U.S. foreign technical assistance programs during the Cold War era, this paper explores the role of U.S. planning practice in the developing world and the significance of the American planner, Albert Mayer, in establishing lines of trust and communication between India and the United States. The contribution of this research to city and regional planning history includes the link it bridges between U.S. planning theory to an increasingly globalized planning practice. Albert Mayer’s groundbreaking work in Post War planning and the subsequent era of U.S. bilateral aid in the developing world offers relevant insight into the broader movement toward global integration of societies and applied technologies.
Inventing the “Pluralist City”: Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard and the Semiotics of Cultural Difference Anthony Raynsford, San Jose State University
Kevin Lynch and his erstwhile student Donald Appleyard are today best known for their theoretical work in rendering urban forms ‘legible’ or ‘imageable,’ whether for pedestrians or for automobile drivers. Lynch’s seminal book of 1960, The Image of the City found its sequel in Lynch and Appleyard’s joint publication of 1964, The View from the Road, which treated the experience of driving as a cinematic sequence of urban images. What is often overlooked, however, is the degree to which both Lynch and Appleyard were attempting to confront, not an abstract, universal perceiver, but rather what they understood as an increasingly diverse and
22 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 subjectively differentiated array of perceivers. This was an understanding intimately connected to emerging social scientific research on American cities in the 1940s and 50s and the shifting politics of what would soon be dubbed the ‘urban crisis’ of the 1960s. Already in 1954, sociologist and urban planner Herbert Gans admonished Lynch not to make “assumptions about emotional effects of structures,” noting, “we really don’t know whom they affect, besides architects, and if so, how.” In the The Image of the City, Lynch subsequently concluded that urban meanings could not be generalized, explaining that “different groups may have widely different images of the same environment.” In fact, both Lynch and Appleyard, assumed that urbanistic experience varied from one viewer to the next in a population that was, Appleyard’s phrase, “pluralist.” It was Appleyard, however, who would go on to develop a pluralistic semiotics of environmental meaning. By the late 1960s, Appleyard began collaborating with his colleague in the Psychology Department, Kenneth Craik, who had recently begun to develop a theory of what he called “environmental dispositions” in order to explain the radically different interpretations that different people might have about the same space. Environments could then hypothetically be tailored to local groups or to entire populations with a certain “environmental disposition.” Appleyard’s concept of the “pluralist city” depended increasingly on studying the symbols and desires of different demographic groups, reconciling their conflicting cultural systems at the level of urban policy. In this respect, citizens were being treated more and more as environmental consumers, under the guise of advocating for unrepresented groups.
This paper investigates the hidden political and ideological assumptions behind the idea of the “pluralist city” as this concept emerged in the writing of Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard. It argues that “pluralism” became a means of normalizing and bypassing more fundamental geographic and economic conflicts while also foreshadowing postmodern perceptions of the city as a constellation of contrasting experiences to be more or less passively consumed as images. Using little known archival material from the MIT Institute Archive and the UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, this paper reassesses the work of Lynch and Appleyard within the larger historiography of late 20th century planning.
Session B2: Beyond the Urban Enclave: Asian Place-Making in the North American Suburb Chair: Erica Allen-Kim Comment: Audience
The Other Suburbanites: A Social History of Asian Mall Development in Silicon Valley Willow Lung-Amam, University of Maryland, College Park
Over the last four decades, Silicon Valley’s booming high tech market has been met by equally booming immigrant populations, particularly among those from Asia. Attracted by both high skilled and low-wage wage employment opportunities, Asian American families have moved into Valley neighborhoods and schools, started businesses and places of worship, repurposed public space, and otherwise reshaped the look, feel, and function of this once predominately white suburban region. Among these changes, the Asian mall stands out as a particularly prominent symbol of Asian Americans’ impact in reshaping the everyday life and landscape of Silicon Valley, and other high tech, suburban areas around the U.S.
23 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
By looking at the changing social and spatial character of Asian malls in Silicon Valley over the last four decades of dramatic demographic change in the region, this paper brings attention to Asian Americans’ important role in shaping the content and character of contemporary suburbia. I argue that Asian malls are a particularly potent space through which to examine the diversity of Asian Americans’ suburban lives, social histories, and place-making practices. They not only mark important shifts in the regional geographies of race and immigration, but also show the diversity of Asian Americans’ needs and aspirations, social and class status, and power over the form and function of the built environment.
This paper underscores the importance of viewing suburbia as a space of everyday life through which urban historians and others might better explore and expose the often-hidden lived geographies and experiences of minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. In an increasingly diverse, metropolitan American landscape, it shows how suburbia has changed to reflect this increasing complexity and the ongoing struggles of marginalized groups to make place and home in it.
Home Work: School Building and Community Building in the East San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles Jennifer Hock, Independent Scholar
Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley stretches eastward along the lifelines of the 10, 210, and 60 freeways, from Alhambra and Monterey Park through El Monte and West Covina out to Walnut and Diamond Bar. The cities and towns in this part of greater Los Angeles, described as ethnoburbs by Wei Li in her 2009 book, are among the most racially and ethnically diverse in the county. Signs outside the grocery stores, strip malls, and restaurants here identify these many of these places as centers of Asian American and Pacific Islander (API) life in the San Gabriel Valley.
Both API suburbs and older, urban enclaves have traditionally been identified by and associated with these commercial districts, but for many affluent and upwardly mobile suburbs, the less visible public schools are just as important. In the east San Gabriel Valley particularly, academically strong public schools hidden away in residential neighborhoods are a primary attraction for new immigrants, a key determinant of house values, and an important factor in the creation of wealth for API households. In a suburban context where metropolitan and transnational ties are strong, schools also remain stubbornly local and place-based, a locus of conflict and community building.
Focusing on the history of high school construction in the young East San Gabriel Valley city of Diamond Bar, this paper argues that we need to consider the roles of public schools in the politics of racial formation East San Gabriel Valley. Excellent standardized test scores and the school district’s good reputation helped establish Diamond Bar as a destination both for migrants from the central city and for recent immigrants, and the construction of new schools has always been a contentious topic—particularly the construction of high schools, which are a means of social mobility for young adults aspiring to enter the state university system.
24 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Rapid growth, however, meant that the school system always remained chaotic, its meaning, direction, and rewards continually contested. For many years, Diamond Bar was an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, with no local government of its own. School district lines had been determined by the property boundaries of the ranches and farms that had previously occupied that part of the valley, rather than current municipal and political boundaries. This paper contrasts the construction of Diamond Bar High School, serving the south end of the town, opening in the early 1980s during a period of racial transition and emphasizing high-stakes testing and a rigorous curriculum, with Diamond Ranch High School, serving the north end of the town and the adjacent city of Pomona, opening fifteen years later with an emphasis on multiculturism and shared public spaces. As we can see in these two cases, the siting, design, and development of new high schools responded to the changing demographics of area and in turn helped shape the identities of East San Gabriel Valley residents.
The End of the Ethnic Mall? From Chinese Theming to Cross-Over Mainstream at Markham’s Remington Center Erica Allen-Kim, University of Toronto
It has been twenty years since the first ethnic mall opened in the Greater Toronto Area. Dragon Center, an enclosed mall constructed on a former skating rink in Scarborough, was followed by twelve more shopping centers catering to Chinese immigrants between 1983 and 1987. An influx of immigrants and investments from Hong Kong during the 1990s led to ever larger developments in nearby Markham and Richmond Hill, transforming this area in northeastern GTA into an ethnoburb. The GTA now boasts six “Chinatowns,” four of which are outside of the downtown core. The proliferation of retail condominiums was fueled by Hong Kong Chinese seeking alternative investment opportunities in the years leading up to the PRC’s resumed control of the British colony in 1997. Since the global recession, proposed ethnic- themed developments have stalled. A confluence of factors including an oversaturated market, slowing immigration, and wariness over the retail condominium model has led some planners, investors, and journalists to predict the end of the ethnic mall in the GTA.
This paper traces the transformation of Markham’s retail landscape within the regional and global contexts of planning, commercial development, and immigrant entrepreneurship. The shopping center serves as a weathervane of Markham’s continuing transformation from a rural township to an ethnoburb. The Chinese share of Markham’s the population tripled between 1986 and 1991. Local Canadian developers responded to the growing demand for small business and investment opportunities by Hong Kong Chinese, and many began offering the retail condominium, a popular development model in Hong Kong. The two largest shopping centers are adjacent to the Millikin GO train station on Steeles Avenue. The site originally contained two rural Ontarian themed shopping centers constructed between 1980 and 1990, which were redeveloped as Pacific Mall and Market Village during the mid-1990s.
In 2006 a rival mall, Splendid China Tower, opened directly across from Market Village on the site of a former Canadian Tire. Market Village and Pacific Mall joined together to announce plans for Remington Centre, a multi-use mall, hotel, and office complex. Its marketing identity has shifted from Asian themed to cross-over mainstream transit oriented development over the past six years as the developers responded to a changing market. The retail
25 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 condominium model benefits small businesses and overseas investors. It is unsurprising that the building boom coincided with political and economic instability in the years leading up to Hong Kong’s transferal from British to Chinese rule.
Wei Li’s ethnoburb model allows us to see how immigrant settlements operate within global networks of economy, politics, and culture. The ethnic mall serves as both an ideal social space for recent immigrants and a distribution point for transnational business networks. The majority of Chinese malls in the GTA are mixed-use with retail and offices for service professionals. In spite of racist comments by locals, the planning department has maintained a neutral user-blind position. In 1995, deputy mayor Carole Bell complained in a local paper that “We once had one of the finest communities in North America with enviable business parks and the top corporations of the land. Now all we get are [Chinese] theme malls to serve people way beyond our borders.” Nearly twenty years later, Markham’s retail landscape appears to be changing directions. This paper reassesses the city’s function as an ethnoburb. The re-branding of ethnic malls as cross-over mainstream centers indicates a dynamic social geography responsive to changing demographics and economic conditions.
Session B3: Public Space and Urban Order Sponsored by the Public Works Historical Society Chair: Owen Gutfreund, Hunter College Comment: Owen Gutfreund, Hunter College
Light as Policeman: The Ideology of the Street Lamp’s Ability to Fight Crime in American Cities Anne Beamish, Kansas State University
Since the 17th century public lighting in American cities has served three main purposes: functional, spectacle and security. This paper addresses the third purpose and challenges the assumption that the link between crime reduction and brightly lit streets is relatively new and a late nineteenth/early twentieth century development.
Using historical newspapers, journals, and city documents, this paper investigates the origins of the assumption that street lighting would reduce crime in American cities.
It found that indeed the electrical companies were some of the most vociferous proponents, but they were not alone. The metaphor of “a good lamp is the best policeman” is attributed to several people, including Theodore Roosevelt when he was New York’s police commissioner in the 1890s (Lacombe 1913: 538), the New York chief of police in the 1880s (Preece 1884: 73), and even earlier in the 1860s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson (1892) wrote that “gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police.”
But the link between street lighting and security wasn’t only an abstract idea. The installation of gas lighting in Philadelphia was in direct response to a robbery and murder in 1802 of a farmer named Peter Bachkerker on Market Street between the ferry and the Centre House. The crime was attributed to the dark streets and citizens petitioned the council to
26 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 install lights between the Schuylkill River and built parts of the city (Public Service 1912: 174).
The demand for increased street lighting was also in response to the ineffectiveness of the night watch. Until the mid 19th century, an organized police force that was responsible for security both day and night simply did not exist. Until then, nocturnal street security was the responsibility of the night watch. Though a 1724 New England newspaper called the watch “the greatest Safeguard to the Town in the Night,” (New-England Courant 1724: 1), in reality the watch was a beleaguered, hapless, and underpaid workforce and not very effective in stopping crime because in 1769 a letter to the editor posed the question: “Now that house and shop breaking is become so frequent in this town, … Would not that be prevented in a great measure, by lighting the streets?” (Boston Chronicle 1769: 64). At the time oil lamps were the only option and most American cities followed and eventually emulated London’s street lighting policy, which was based on the belief that the city had to be lit “every dark Hour, in order to prevent […] Robberies, Burglaries, and all manner of lewd Practices” (Boston News-Letter 1736:1).
In summary, the positive relationship between street lighting and increased security is not recent. This narrative has been promoted repeatedly in American cities since the seventeen century with every new wave of lighting technology, whether it was oil, gas, or electricity. Similarly, over the centuries the evidence that street lighting actually reduced street crime is minimal, but it does appear to have had a very positive effect on residents’ perception or sense of security.
Infrastructure as Spectacle: Water in Nineteenth Century New York Gwynneth C. Malin, City University of New York
Visually spectacular reservoirs, aqueducts, and water fountains were part of urban landscape in nineteenth century New York. This paper examines the shifting public perception of water as New Yorkers interacted with city-supplied water in three distinct ways between 1883 and 1890. Recently arrived immigrants drank from charity run water fountains fed by city mains. Such charities and temperance advocates promoted water as a free, healthy drink to replace beer and rum. Working and middle class New Yorkers visited the High Bridge of the Old Croton Aqueduct, where they experienced public water infrastructure first hand. As they participated in this visually arresting site of public water, which was often represented in the visual record, a corresponding popular awareness of water as a public resource began to take shape. The reading public followed the news about the construction of the impressive New Croton Aqueduct through publications such as Scientific American. Anyone interested could also attend public meetings about the project held by the city government. City officials made an effort to share information with the public about the process of building and financing this new aqueduct, which would be hidden underground, rather than displayed dramatically above ground. By drinking Croton water and by interacting with and reading about water infrastructure, New Yorkers came to think of water as abundant and as managed completely by the public sector before the city and state possessed the necessary infrastructure, bureaucracy, and finances to make water fully public. Such interactions with city-supplied water bolstered the publicity of water, the idea that water should be a public utility to be managed in plain view of the people.
27 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Boasting of the City Beautiful: Civic Pride and Depression-Era Public Works in the “Ambitious City” of Hamilton Ontario Allison Marie Ward, Queen’s University
In 1929 Hamilton, Ontario was at the peak of a decade of expansion, with industrial investments totalling fifteen-million dollars in that year alone. As Hamilton’s industrial base expanded, its infrastructure and real estate grew accordingly, with gorgeous new parks, elaborate public architecture projects, and homes and suburbs spreading to the city’s west and south, up the picturesque Niagara escarpment. That year also saw the completion of the city’s first skyscraper, the announcement of McMaster University’s new Hamilton campus, and the reinvigoration of the city’s downtown, with the erection of a Bank of Montreal branch built entirely out of Hamilton materials and labour, among other private buildings. City Council and the Chamber of Commerce’s Joint Industrial and Publicity Committee rebranded Hamilton the “City Beautiful.” While a surprising campaign in an age of plenty, the continuation of this ideologically fuelled project during the Great Depression, when the city used its ever decreasing funds for the construction of both functional and beautiful spaces for the public, speaks to larger ideological questions surrounding municipal planning in times of hardship.
This paper will examine the use of “City Beautiful” rhetoric, project development, advertising, and regional planning during the Depression. These projects thrived through the efforts of the municipal government, private enterprise, and federal and provincial funding. Engaging with literature on public architecture, the City Beautiful movement, and urbanization, but also North American histories of public works projects, my work will examine the continual efforts of Hamilton’s city council, middle-class boosters, and Chamber of Commerce to turn the name “Ambitious City,” a nickname often condescendingly used by major Toronto newspapers, into a positive one instead. This analysis will examine the city through the boosterish lens of tourism advertisements, promotional materials for the city’s annual Produced-in-Canada exhibitions, and annual reviews published by both the Hamilton Spectator and the Hamilton Herald. This overly positive tone will be grounded by the more pragmatic perspectives of municipal departments, relief works planners, and the Chamber of Commerce. This material will provide fruitful ground to interrogate Hamiltonians’ shared ideals of community identity, improvement for the greater good, and a shared heritage of “progress”, and how these themes speak to larger transnational discussions of public spending on municipal improvements in times of fiscal hardship.
Models of Growth and Urban Planning in Ciudad Juarez René Saucedo Ezequiel Muñoz, Universidad Autonoma de Ciudad Juarez
This work is part of a doctoral thesis that addresses an important question as to understand the following: How are models of urban growth in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, from the viewpoint of hygiene and green spaces, regarding neighborhood parks? With the understanding that these models have identified as cityscape of Ciudad Juarez and parties identified as colonies-splits.
These urban growth models have parks, which have a direct impact in shaping the
28 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 city, as general manner as particular, which is considered relevant the study, based on analysis of green areas (urban parks, of colony and fractionation) in including all relevant local regulatory plans and Urban Directors in Ciudad Juarez, and on the other hand has also been a constant demand on the part of the inhabitants in the absence of public spaces for recreation, ludic and sport.
The approach of the study and draw from the analysis sociocritic historiography, to get a better understanding of reality and context we are studying.
Session B4: Eco-Urbanism Chair: Robin Bachin, University of Miami Comment: Robin Bachin, University of Miami
Magic City 2.0: Narratives of Utopia and Sustainability in Treasure Island’s Planning History Tanu Sankalia, University of San Francisco
On June 7, 2011, the San Francisco City and County Board of Supervisors approved an ambitious plan for a new neighborhood of 19,000 residents on the man-made, 400-acre land mass called Treasure Island, located in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The Treasure Island Development Plan (TIDP) is a capital-intensive, high-rise city that includes a ferry terminal, retail and hotels, a sixty-story LEED certified condo tower, and 300 acres of open space with organic urban farming and wetlands. The plan has been received as a harbinger of the future of cities, and a triumph in “green” design, adopting innovative planning policies such as unbundled parking and congestion pricing seamlessly packaged alongside climate-responsive high-design. Critics and commentators have described the plan as an antidote to urban sprawl, and as utopian “eco-urbanism.”
This contemporary vision follows upon a historical layering of development that began with the physical creation of Treasure Island from landfill in the San Francisco Bay as one of the regional centerpieces of pre-World War II WPA projects in 1939. Treasure Island was briefly re-invented as The Magic City—the site for the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) held between 1939 and1940. The current proposal, now called Magic City 2.0, reuses the Naval Station developed on the island at the onset of World War II. This paper will examine the recent planning history of Treasure Island. Since 1993, when jurisdiction over the island shifted the to the City and County of San Francisco as part of federal plan of Base Relocation and Closure (BRAC), Treasure Island has been the subject of five distinct scenarios of development ranging from land- use overlays and modest urban design solutions to its most recent grand vision. This long and sometimes contentious process has deftly negotiated the California State Tidelands Trust regulations and San Francisco Bay Conservation directives.
Inherent in the production of a utopian, environmentally sustainable city on Treasure Island are the tangles of its historic contexts that contradict, complicate, or create challenges for the many promises of the new city. Among its historic legacies are its unstable flat topography in an earthquake prone region threatened by global warming
29 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 and sea-level rise; the lingering effects of imperial formations showcased in the GGIE and its pan-Pacific themes; and, decades long military occupation that has engendered radiation and significant soil contamination.
By tracking the planning and design process of the TIDP, this paper will analyze and critique historical and theoretical considerations of utopia and sustainability that underpin large- scale property development. Are conceptions of “ecotopia” founded on the environmental and social reproduction of lived space or based on an idealization of urban form that mirrors current paradigms of property development? Is sustainability culture, or the “greening” of urban design plans and projects entirely essential and true, or contingent and constructed? These are some of the questions that the planning history of TIDP provokes.
The Evolution of “Progress” and Three Rival Narratives: Risk Aversion, Self-Organization, and Sustainability Scott Campbell, University of Michigan
Planning scholars are ambivalent about constructing visions of the future: overtly dismissing the ideology of progress as an antiquated faith and tacitly believing in it. Yet progress is arguably the planning profession’s stock in trade, and its rejection creates a void. The heavy- handed censuring of modernism, the bruising experiences with postwar urban renewal, and the often anti-technology stance of environmentalism have blackened progress’s status. This paper critically rehabilitates the idea of progress, mindful that its evocation has historically served not only as an inspiration for planning, but also as a rationalization of controversial, disruptive interventions.
In an earlier paper, I traced the intellectual history of “progress” through four planning eras: progressive, modernist, urban crisis, environmentalist (Campbell 2012). I now examine the recent evolution of progress and challenges from three competing narratives of the future: sustainability, risk-aversion, and self-organized urbanization.
First, the sustainability movement has largely rejected the ideology of progress by both equating progress with unbounded economic growth and highlighting global environmental degradation and social inequality as evidence of progress’s folly. The contemporary alliance of progress with just one side of this debate – the growth and expansion side – thwarts an nascent movement towards progressive sustainability.
Second, a contemporary inclination toward “risk-adverse” planning rebuffs progress. The engagement with progress is the engagement with risk. In an era of incrementalism, Jane Jacobs’ conservatism, and planning’s version of the Hippocratic oath “first do no harm,” we have striven to minimize the risk associated with big plans and projects. This is an understandable impulse. But the future is getting built with or without us: megaprojects, power plants, highways. Society is building a future full of risks.
Third, the dominance of market-logic ideology marginalizes the tradition of collective progress through public works. This privatized corporatism, masquerading as “self-organized
30 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 systems” not needing conscious regulation, appropriates and redefines “progress” as innovative, non-planned emergence. Planners therefore do not have the option of choosing between progress and no progress, but instead between two divergent visions of progress: a neo-liberal vision as predominantly private economic growth, and a return to planning's task as balancing two complementary sources of progress: private entrepreneurship and public governance. Continued reactive opposition to progress merely puts planning on the defensive, allowing opponents of planning to redefine progress in narrow terms and rhetorically use it in their attacks on planning.
Affordability and Access for All: The Politics of Fresh Food at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, Yale University
In late 2011, public officials in New York City announced plans to demolish nine of the eleven historic buildings of Admiral’s Row, part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in order to build a 74,000-square-foot value-priced supermarket. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz called it an opportunity to ensure “access to fresh and affordable foods in a neighborhood that is underserved.” That same year, officials also announced plans for a one-acre rooftop farm to be located atop a renovated warehouse at the Yard. Situated amidst public housing, the Brooklyn waterfront, and rapidly gentrifying areas, this formerly industrial site, used for over a century and a half by the Navy until its 1966 departure, has engendered a series of unexpected political alignments and questions concerning the role of food production and distribution in the urban landscape.
Using ethnographic interviews, spatial analysis, and archival evidence, this paper tracks contemporary cultural conflict over the ways that food is strategically used as part of plans to convert the Brooklyn Navy Yard into what Mayor Bloomberg calls, “a national model for the development of a sustainable industrial district.” In recent years, over 30 businesses at the Yard have made “sustainability a core component of their business approach.” Of these businesses, several grow or produce consumables. This paper profiles the new rooftop farm, bee keeping operation, and distillery, all of which are symbolically linked to a thriving local food movement in Brooklyn. The farm is one of the largest of its kind in the world, funded with hundreds of thousands of dollars through a combination of public and private sources organized by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a public-private partnership created to manage the site on behalf of the City of New York. In addition, the farm is connected to a commercial apiary with at least 25 beehives, and small-batch distillery that produces moonshine and bourbon for sale at high-end liquor stores, bars, and restaurants in the area. This paper contrasts the growth of these new food businesses, marketed to well-to-do Brooklynites, with plans for a new supermarket, intended for low-income residents of color living in nearby public housing.
The paper also reads the material layers of the Brooklyn Navy Yard for its history as a major food distribution center, interweaving this legacy with its current uses. It revisits the time period when the Yard hosted Wallabout Market, the largest wholesale food market in the world, from the 1880s until 1939, when the Navy forcibly evicted the market to expand its industrial. It concludes with a discussion of competing meanings of environmental and social sustainability as they relate to food policy in the context of neoliberal development projects.
31 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Session B5: Center and Periphery in the British Commonwealth Ward (RBF) Chair: Shane Ewen, Leeds Metropolitan University Comment: Shane Ewen, Leeds Metropolitan University
The 1943 County of London Plan Exhibition Robert Freestone, University of New South Wales
The London County Council (LCC 1889-1965) was “awkwardly sandwiched” between a close and overbearing central government and a multitude of petty local boroughs but was nevertheless “the ‘flagship’ of British local government: larger, more adventurous, more intelligent and better organised than other town and county halls across the country, but essentially performing the same task” (Saint, 1989, xii).
The aim of this paper is to explore how the LCC negotiated for resources from the central government and the local boroughs in hosting and organising the County of London Plan Exhibition, 1943, and how these negotiations eventually influenced the exhibition content and design.
The post-war reconstruction era was marked by numerous planning exhibitions which provide a window on the contemporary nature of communication and consultation in planning practice (Lilley and Larkham 2007).
The publication of the County of London Plan was a major milestone in post- war British planning. War-torn Britain looked to planning as one of the ways of ‘winning the peace’. Painstakingly researched and marshalling the latest concepts in neighbourhood planning, green infrastructure connectivity, housing redevelopment and urban design, the plan foregrounded the subsequent Greater London Plan 1944. The County of London Plan was also a major milestone in the career of its co-author Patrick Abercrombie, confirming his national and indeed international fame, especially within the British Commonwealth.
The County of London Plan exhibition formed part of a wider propaganda effort including the making of the film Proud City. Significant resources were deployed in advertising the event which included the hiring of a public relations firm to advise the LCC. Detailed correspondence was undertaken to negotiate with municipalities and Ministries for sites to advertise the exhibition. Invitations were sent to Embassies to attend the event. The King and Queen made a high-profile visit.
Given the importance of the County of London Plan to the development of planning ideas and their visual representation, the exhibition warrants consideration. This paper will describe the making of the exhibition, consider its content, design and significance for local government,, and reflect on its importance as a high water mark in the culture of 20th century planning exhibition culture (Freestone and Amati 2011).
Fifty Years On: 1963 London Government Act Revisited Michael Hebbert, University College London The 1963 London Government Act established the Greater London Council (GLC) as a
32 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 directly elected metropolitan authority for the entirety of London’s continuously built-up area. This upper tier council with its metro- wide powers was hailed at the time as a paragon of modern city government, not least for its progressive planning and architecture departments. And although it was abolished two decades later by Mrs Thatcher and its functions and assets dispersed, the GLC’s spatial footprint still survives as the basis of the contemporary mayoral system established under the 1999 Greater London Authority Act.
My paper revisits the 1963 reform from a perspective of planning history, considering specifically the background deliberations of the 1960 Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London. Its chairman Sir Edwin Herbert asked for submissions from universities when he issued the call for evidence in 1958. My paper looks particularly at the two most significant pieces of academic evidence which came from two rival teams of researchers within the University of London: on the one hand, the Greater London Group of the London School of Economics, chaired by the august lawyer William Robson, editor of the leading comparative text on metropolitan management, Great Cities of the World, their Government Politics and Planning (1954) as well as the sarcastic, polemical Government & Misgovernment of London (1948); on the other hand, the equally brilliant multidisciplinary team at the Centre for Urban Studies at UCL, headed by the sociologist Ruth Glass. Both teams argued their cases with flair, and seminal publications arising include Glass (1964) London – Aspects of Change, Gerald Rhodes (1970) The Struggle for Reform and, indirectly, Peter Hall (1962) London 2000,
As well as shedding valuable light on attitudes towards London’s planning and redevelopment in the postwar decades, the evidence to Herbert and accompanying literature posed fundamental questions about metropolitan scale, government and politics that deserve re- examination today.
Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Marshall McLuhan and Planning Education at the University of Toronto, 1951-1955 Ellen Shoshkes, Portland State University
This paper sheds light on the under-recognized contribution of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905– 83), British town planner and educator, to the establishment of the Division of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Toronto in 1955. The paper highlight’s Tyrwhitt’s role both in laying the ground work for the program as well as introducing modernist urban planning and design ideas and inter-disciplinary pedagogical ideals. Tyrwhitt was invited to the University of Toronto as a Visiting Professor for the 1951–52 academic year—she was replacing Anthony Adamson, a locally prominent architect—to set up a new graduate program in town and regional planning; she also gave a lecture course and supervised the work of the 5th year architecture students. She signed on for another one- year position as Visiting Professor and in January 1953 she was asked to assume more responsibilities for the still experimental planning program when Adamson took a leave of absence.
Tyrwhitt drew on her experience in Britain creating inter-disciplinary curricula for planning based on the synoptic principles of Patrick Geddes. She mobilized her transnational connections to quickly become involved in “the Canadian scene,” where she was one of only four professors of planning: she had taught the founder of the program at the University of
33 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Manitoba and worked with the founder of the planning program at McGill University. She had also gone to school with the administrator at the Central (later Canadian) Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) who provided the start-up funding for these university programs.
At this time Tyrwhitt also played a leading role in CIAM, the international group of modernist architects. CIAM general secretary Sigfried Giedion urged Tyrwhitt to seek out Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), then a young English professor at St. Michael’s College. Tyrwhitt was one of five faculty sponsors of McLuhan’s proposal to the Ford Foundation, for an inter- disciplinary study of communications. Tyrwhitt leveraged her position as a member of McLuhan’s Ford Foundation funded Exploration Group in academic year 1954–5 to help build support within the university for the graduate program in planning and to secure an endowment for the first chair of town and regional planning in Canada—for which she recruited her old friend Gordon Stephenson.
The paper draws on primary sources, including the Tyrwhitt collection in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Library, a private collection of Tyrwhitt’s papers soon to be deposited at RIBA and the Ford Foundation archives.
The contribution of this paper is to provide a more nuanced and historically complete portrait of the emergence and evolution of this key Canadian planning program.
Session B6: Public Housing: The Long Search for an Urban Vision Chair: Roger Biles, Illinois State University Comment: Kristin Szylvian, St. John’s University
Row Housing as Public Housing: Philadelphia’s “Used Housing” Program, 1957-2000 John F. Bauman, University of Southern Maine
In the 1954 Housing Act, President Eisenhower’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, Chaired by Baltimore Developer James Rouse, produced urban renewal. The 1954 act, while freeing developers from the “primarily residential” clause of the 1949 housing law, and stressing housing rehabilitation as well as planning, zoning, and “workable programs,” contained, importantly, a little--studied section. It called for demonstration programs pioneering alternatives to the project model of public housing, i.e., utilizing “existing,” rehabilitated housing to shelter the poor.
This paper explores the first of these demonstrations: Philadelphia’s plan to use existing row--houses as an alternative to such racially segregated, socially isolated, low--income public housing projects as the city’s Richard Allen Homes. As this paper explains, the city’s “Used Housing Program” fit into the social planning of a city sworn by its “new” 1951 City Charter (which created a Commission of Human Relations) to overcome racial discrimination both in jobs and housing (See Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, UPenn, 2006).
Despite the fact that a court challenge to Philadelphia’s “Used Housing” initiative
34 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 delayed the program for a decade, the city ultimately embraced used housing. As this paper points out, it was the availability of now unfashionable and, therefore, cheap row housing in a deindustrializing, increasingly segregated black city, more than its originally conceived potential for promoting integration that made “Used Housing” a desirable alternative. In the 1970s “Used Housing” proved not only cheap, but it also proved appealing to a city and to a nation anxious for private sector alternatives to the tarnished solution of “conventional” public housing. Use housing can thus be seen as a prelude to Turnkey Housing, Section ( (1974) and after 1989 the Low--Income Tax Credit as affordable housing alternatives. It was an early example of America’s “retreat from public housing.” However, by the 1990s the enormous cost of maintaining such housing, much of it built in the 1880s, rendered the idea, dubious. The Philadelphia Housing Authority today is desperately trying to unburden itself of its “Used Housing” stock, and, in keeping with the spirit of HOPE VI, has demolished almost all of its high- - rise “projects” and as in other cities, seeks instead to create, green, modern, mixed--income “villages.”
Seeking Alternatives to Traditional Public Housing in Chicago, 1950-1982 D. Bradford Hunt, Roosevelt University
Even before Catherine Bauer decried the “Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing” in a seminal 1956 critique, local housing authorities in the U.S. had been seeking alternatives to the model of large-scale projects that had been the primary mode of social housing delivery as envisioned in the 1937 and 1949 Housing Acts.
This paper focuses on those efforts in Chicago, and draws on new research and on material not published in my book Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. Beginning in 1954, the Chicago Housing Authority began experimenting with a program mixing renovation and new construction. It also tried smaller, non-concentrated sites in the 1950s. These experiments never became mainstream policy, and the CHA continued with the standard program of large-scale projects. Still, these efforts, and the difficulties in their implementation, deserve consideration as examples of early disenchantment with public housing policy and as alternative paths not taken.
Chicago’s idea for renovation and new construction took place at Rockwell Gardens, where conditions defied the usual “slum” category. The CHA in 1954 proposed rehabilitation of salvageable properties combined with targeted clearance and rebuilding. But the end result was less than satisfactory, as dense project buildings interspersed with pockets of 19th century rehabbed buildings created too much architectural and community dissonance. The rehabbed buildings did not survive.
Around this same time, the CHA envisioned Chicago’s Washington Park Homes as clusters of row houses sprinkled on sites across the south side. The idea was to avoid large-scale projects with their disruptive influences and concentrations of low-income residents. However, in order to meet federal cost regulations, the CHA was forced to offset the costly row houses with a handful of handful of high-rise buildings (built at low cost per unit), also incongruously spread across the south side. Still, the broader effort to disperse public housing (spatially, though not in terms of the racial makeup of neighborhoods) did not fit well in a federal program that still
35 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 operated on the basis of “projects.”
Thus even before local policy entered a period of flux in the late 1960s, when the idea of “scattered sites” dominated housing policy thinking through the early 1980s, the CHA was experimenting with different ways to produce and deliver affordable housing. These efforts have tended to be subsumed in the larger story of public housing decline or been neglected in the story of late 1960s reforms through the courts. The longer history of alternatives to public housing needs to be explored.
Legacies of Hope? The Remaking of San Francisco Public Housing Amy L. Howard, University of Richmond
In 2005, the energetic new mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, prioritized the transformation of public housing as part of his agenda. Walking around the long-neglected projects in the southeast part of the city, he vowed to find local solutions: “HOPE VI has been essentially gutted by the Bush administration. Rather than waiting for Air Force One to come to SFO, we are acknowledging there is a problem (in public housing) and we are taking responsibility and we are not waiting for someone else.”
Drawing on lessons from the HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) sites that leveraged $118 million in federal funds and $186 in public and private monies to redevelop six public housing projects, as well as successes and challenges nationally, the mayor, the Office of Housing, and the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) embarked on an ambitious plan to revitalize neighborhoods, public housing—and lives. HOPE SF aims to create “thriving, mixed-income communities that provide residents healthy, safe homes and the support they need to succeed. Green buildings, better schools, new local businesses and onsite resident services will transform these communities and provide opportunities to the residents who have struggled here for generations.” With limited federal funding and a stagnant economy, is there still hope for San Francisco’s distressed public housing projects?
This paper will examine the goals and limited achievements (to date) of the HOPE SF program within the context of the city’s troubled history of public housing. Racist policies (upheld by the SFHA years after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal), the failed leadership of multiple Executive Directors of the SFHA, and mismanagement contributed to decades of decline in the city’s public housing sites between 1965- 1995. These public failures, as well as the persistent activism of tenants in public housing, reverberated in the aims set forth for the HOPE SF program. Only time will tell if the HOPE SF program will emerge as a national model, a series of unfinished redevelopment projects, or something in between. Understanding the links between the history of public housing in San Francisco and its current progressive aims will illuminate the challenges and opportunities for the future of public housing there and elsewhere.
Session B7: The Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe: Antecedents and Influences
36 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Chair: Richard White, UTM Comment: Sy Adler, Portland State University
Right-Wing Populism and the Curious Revival of Regional Planning in Toronto Zack Taylor, University of Toronto Scarborough
Since the 1960s, the Toronto region has been the subject of three provincial government- led regional planning efforts: the Toronto-Centred Region Concept (1970–74), the Greater Toronto Area guidelines and policy statement (1988–95), and the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (2001–2006). In each case, planners adapted and applied contemporary international planning ideas to the problem of accommodating rapid population growth. The first two efforts — both highly technocratic in process and proposed implementation — collapsed due to unclear objectives, the unexpected onset of economic recession, and an inability to meet growing demands for public participation in planning processes. In 2000–2003, an anti-planning, market-oriented, and populist Conservative government initiated a new regional planning process that broke the technocratic mould by adopting a highly visible and inclusionary approach to securing the input, agreement, and support of key stakeholders, including municipal leaders, property developers, environmentalists, and farmers. This was consistent with the government’s populist ideology. When the centrist Liberal Party took power in 2003, it retained the inclusionary process while redirecting it toward the development of conventional regulatory land use planning instruments. The policies ultimately enacted were similar to those proposed by planners previously. This time, however, the open process provided a forum that, by virtue of giving key groups ownership over the problem and its framing, conferred legitimacy on latent planning knowledge.
This case is significant because it highlights the enduring distinction between metropolitan/regional and local/urban planning. As Robert Fishman has noted, regional planning has proved largely immune to the participatory revolution that has occurred in community planning since the 1960s. In the Toronto case, changing the process unlocked a politically acceptable solution. It is intriguing, however, that the revival of regional planning was effected by the least likely of protagonists: a market-fundamentalist government with no interest in planning or other forms of regulation.
This study is based on extensive interviews with policymakers and stakeholders as well as review and analysis of the government’s internal consultation records.
Constructing a Regional Conservation Plan: Planners, Scientists, and the Oak Ridge Moraine L. Anders Sandberg and Gerda Wekerle, York University
This paper traces the roots and institutionalization of ideas pertaining to ecosystems planning efforts to conserve the Oak Ridges Moraine, a 160-kilometre ridge of sand and gravel that caps the Toronto region and stretches from the Niagara Escarpment in the west to Rice Lake in the east. In the 1970s, emergent ideas of ecosystem and watershed planning underpinned proposals to conserve sensitive natural areas threatened by sprawl on the Moraine. By the 1990s, a cottage industry of scientists, planners and environmental groups produced reports on the threats to the Moraine, its ecological and hydrological significance, and recommended measures
37 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 to conserve it. By the late 1990s, Moraine residents and environmentalists joined the efforts. Amongst a loud public outcry against the building of new subdivisions, and ample media coverage, the Moraine received protected status in 2001. Environmental planners and natural scientists played a significant role, especially in framing the Moraine as a conservation object and ensuring the institutionalization of conservation planning at the regional scale. The efforts to conserve the Moraine, and the planning rationalities and scientific knowledge that underpin them, now shape the growth of the region while also exacerbating the very problems they are intended to solve.
This presentation draws on research for a soon-to-published book, co-authored with Liette Gilbert: The Oak Ridges Moraine: Development, Sprawl, and Nature Conservation in the Toronto Region (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, May 2013).
From Dispersion to Recentralization? North American Metropolitan Planning Models and Strategies Pierre Filion, Anna Kramer, and Gary Sands, University of Waterloo
Growing dissatisfaction with present urban form and transportation has resulting in the formulation of planning models attempting to substitute recentralization to prevailing dispersed development. The survey of planning documents with a metropolitan focus, originating from North American urban regions with a population exceeding one million, indicates widespread support for urban recentralization and the proposal of different models and strategies apt to achieve this outcome. The discussion points to the advantages of well-coordinated metropolitan- scale strategies in achieving recentralization while considering anticipated difficulties in departing from dispersion.
Session B8: Roundtable: The Physical City: Social Change and Urban Space Session II: Learning from the Recent Past Moderator: Marta Gutman, City College of New York
Home Ownership, Disciplinary Knowledge, and Lessons for the Foreclosure Crisis Matt Lasner, Hunter College
Homeownership has come under intense scrutiny since the foreclosure crisis. There has been significant disagreement. Most parties, however, share several assumptions that have bracketed discussion: motivation to own is dominated by financial considerations, dwelling practices are shaped by policy, ownership carries fixed meanings, and ownership is related to certain physical forms, geographies, and lifestyles. Absent from this debate, dominated by social scientists, has been rigorous questioning of how housing works on the ground. My research on alternative kinds of ownership—including non-speculative formats like the limited-equity co-op but also of commodity ownership of apartments—offers one model for re-examining the spaces, everyday practices, and meanings of ownership. Contrary to common assumptions about ownership, these ways of living emerged not as a result of policy but in spite of it, as a product of common dwelling practices. Meanwhile, investigating ownership of typologies typically tenanted on a rental basis highlights important meanings of ownership beyond the mercenary,
38 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 including the role of ownership in structuring community. More generally, I argue that study of ownership in an unfamiliar context offers a critical perspective from which to test assumptions and thus an essential tool for creating a truly progressive system of housing provision.
Washington Heights and Struggles for Urban Recovery Rob Snyder, Rutgers University
The Occupy Movement Granite and Asphalt + Algorithms and Information Jonathan Massey, Syracuse University School of Architecture
The camp that Occupy Wall Street built in Zuccotti Park in fall 2011 focused the world on the physical city as a site of contestation over social change. Bodies gathered in streets and squares have a uniquely powerful capacity for claiming attention and forming assemblies capable of deliberative self-government. At the same time, the camp and its activities were shaped by their mediation in virtual venues, from websites and blogs to social media and crowdmaps. The right to the city hinges on the material and spatial attributes of urban places-- as they are construed and appropriated based on social and spatial imaginaries of many kinds.
Drawing on participant observation, primary documentation, and other research, I show how both concrete and abstract topographies of Lower Manhattan shaped the Occupy movement across its archipelago of sites and spaces encompassing numerous public, semi-public, and private places. Specific features of the built environment--the height and orientation of a bench, the width of a street, the layout of a restaurant, the placement of an outlet--conditioned the size, scale, time, and character of Occupy groups and actions. The features and functions of online media likewise shaped the assemblies they hosted. By highlighting ways that the affordances of both physical and virtual cities shaped Occupy Wall Street, I show how the movement’s distinctive counterpolity emerged from a translocal geography constructed at once online and in the streets.
The Spatial Turn in Urban History and Lessons for Planning Practice James M. Buckley, UC Berkeley
The work of planning historians contrasts in many ways with that of their future subjects: contemporary planning practitioners and academics. Encouraged by critics like Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, scholars of historical city building processes examine how existing physical places and spatial relationships help planners shape decisions about the future urban environment. The “spatial turn” in urban history has resulted in a focus on how actual space and active planning practice lead to progressive change for city residents.
These historical concerns, however, have a relatively small impact in contemporary planning. Much of today’s practice and academic research has returned to the present-oriented, positivistic thinking of the profession’s earlier experience. Planners today try to solve complicated urban problems like climate change adaptation and regional development coordination using vast quantities of quantifiable data and scientific reasoning, and display less interest in variable historical context or ambiguous, situated meanings. When they consider the past, planners today often employ freeze-dried concepts of “historical” development patterns,
39 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 stripped of their social histories, as a template for new design practices.
Planning education, in particular, draws little upon the field’s historical experience to help students understand how past situations could help them address contemporary ones, while academic research and teaching rarely incorporate examinations of the actual struggle over meaning of the planning policies in their haste to create new paradigms. Academic interest in actual planning practice today is largely focused on interpretation of planning as a series of discursive, “communicative” acts, rather than an embodied, physically situated activity. Could a history of planning that takes into account actual physical and social space lead to better- grounded planning practice and scholarship today? I argue that planning historians should grapple with the contemporary planning agenda with several goals in mind:
- to advocate for a place for history in the presentist context of current planning. - to emphasize that seeking the role of space in planning history parallels the need for active investigation of the actual sites of planning practice today. - to demonstrate anew the inability of planners to understand the full consequences of their policies. - to provide on-the-ground examples of how progressive change can come about.
My discussion will draw on examples of my own work in academia and practice as well that of other historians of the urban experience.
Session B9: Rethinking Renaissance: Planning Pittsburgh since 1945, Part II Chair: Jon Teaford, Purdue University Comment: Ted Muller, University of Pittsburgh
Live on the Hills and Work in the City: Rise and Fall of Renaissance in Wheeling West Virginia Allen Dieterich-Ward, Shippensburg University
Wheeling’s postwar redevelopment began in 1953 with the formation of the Wheeling Area Conference on Community Development, an organization explicitly patterned on the elite group that spearheaded the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Faced with the same declining social and physical landscape as the rest of the Upper Ohio Valley, civic boosters in Wheeling moved quickly to push through smoke abatement laws, issue calls for new highway construction, and establish an urban renewal authority. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, Wheeling Conference supporters struggled to form a political coalition capable of carrying through a downtown revitalization program like that of their larger neighbor upriver. In the early 1970s a referendum in the city resulted in the disbanding of the urban renewal authority itself. The rise and fall of Wheeling’s Renaissance thus provides an opportunity to assess the factors that made possible postwar renewal in Pittsburgh and the difficulty in recreating its success in other parts of the region.
Renaissance and Retrenchment in the 1970s Tracy Neumann, Wayne State University
40 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
In accounts of Pittsburgh’s urban development since 1945, Mayor Pete Flaherty’s tenure from 1970--1977 disrupts a popular narrative of perpetual Renaissance and relentless progress. This paper argues that, to the contrary, the Flaherty administration introduced austerity measures, redevelopment strategies, and infrastructure projects that laid the programmatic and institutional foundations for his successor’s “Renaissance II” development program and helped Pittsburgh transition from its reliance on the development and accumulation strategies typical of the postwar liberal state (pioneered in the city in the 1940s and 1950s) to the strategies that would later becomes fundamental to neoliberal urbanism. Flaherty’s neo--populist, neighborhood--centered approach to central--city revitalization prefigured the Carter administration’s national urban policy and expands our understanding of political and economic retrenchment in the 1970s beyond the more familiar story of the New York City fiscal crisis.
“We Will Gladly Join You in Partnership or See You in Court”: The Growth of Large Not-for- Profits and Consequences of Renaissance in the New Pittsburgh Andrew T. Simpson, Carnegie Mellon University
In 1992, Mayor Sophie Masloff warned large not-for-profits that unless they started making an increased financial contribution in the form of payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOTS, that the City of Pittsburgh would take them to court to recoup what municipal officials perceived to be their “fair share” of the local tax pie. Masloff’s threat represented only one potential strategy employed by city officials since the late 1960’s to address the growing imbalance of power between large not-for-profit employers and local government. This paper uses the debate over PILOTS, and the passage of ACT 55 in 1997, to examine the changing role of large not-for-profits in the City of Pittsburgh from the late 1960’s to the present. It argues that more attention must be paid to the emergence of large not-for-profits as major economic actors and as a focal point for Pittsburgh’s current reinvention narrative. This decision has had real financial consequences for the city’s revenue collection stream, and has also placed elected officials into an uncomfortable role as an arbiter between sometimes-warring parties, as the recent UPMC-Highmark split has dramatically illumined. A more careful consideration of the role of large not-for- profits allows historians and policymakers to better understand the consequences of economic renewal in the post-industrial city.
Session B10: American Dreams and American Militarism: Housing, Demographic Dynamism, and Militarized Cities, 1942-2000 Chair: Henry Taylor, University at Buffalo Comment: Henry Taylor, University at Buffalo
Subverting Urban Renewal in Hampton Roads: The Navy, Norfolk, and the Black Middle Class, 1943-1958 Ryan Reft, UC San Diego
The Navy has long exerted influence over Norfolk’s municipal affairs. Housing and
41 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 urban development served as central issues in military-municipal affairs. Therefore, when Norfolk engaged in the nation’s first urban renewal program, Project One in the early to mid 1950s, housing emerged as a central point of tension. Over the arguments of residents and Navy officials, the city acquired Tanner’ Creek area of the city and razed the Navy’s 2600 Broad Creek Village and replaced it with an industrial park. However, if Norfolk’s municipal leaders believed that the industrial park represented the first step to unabated urban renewal, the city’s middle class Black residents projected a different vision. The presence of the armed forces from World War II through the Korean War and the region’s long history of Black homeownership enabled Norfolk’s African American community to exert some political force even if denied elected office. Through construction of wartime Lanham Act housing the military helped establish middle black enclaves in the Tanner’s Creek section of what was then Norfolk County and by the early 1950s Norfolk City. The 900 unit Liberty Park complex, which housed Black war and service families, 300 unit Oak Leaf Homes in Campostella, and Broad Creek Shores (BCS) separated from the all white Broad Creek Village by a six land highway all came to be centers of Black homeownership. Additionally, the transience of Navy service had enabled African Americans to slowly integrate the Coronado community in Tanner’s Creek. The tensions that emerged from Coronado’s experience functioned as a symbol of the city’s racial tensions. When the city council attempted to seize Broad Creek Shores, BCS homeowners refused and through political pressure and public appeals to property rights and the specter of “another Coronado” subverted urban renewal plans, carving out, with the unintended help of military, Tanner’s Creek for middle class Black homeowners.
Decline and Dynamism: Reading the Built Environment in Santa Ana, California, 1950-2000 Stefani Evans, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
In 1950 Santa Ana, California, with 45,533 residents and forty manufactories, was the urban hub for El Toro Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) and for growing Orange County. By the end of the century the city’s housing units, including those in Tract 1415, were the most densely populated in the U.S. This paper examines the first fifty years of a modest 1950 Santa Ana housing tract of one hundred thirty-nine houses and five commercial lots. Tract 1415 was marketed to World War II veterans with G.I. Bill benefits, many of whom were active-duty military. Active-duty military homeowners by the thousands altered Santa Ana’s landscape by instituting a pattern of absentee-landlord rental properties and frequent housing turnover that continued through the end of the century. Tract 1415 was not Kenneth Jackson’s bucolic escape from urbanity. Instead, the tract was deliberately integrated into the city through mixed land use and public through-traffic. Alterations from without—the City of Santa Ana and a tagging crew—evidence the city’s decline over time: the original 1950 plan by Lifetime Homes and a mid-1960s street widening project exemplified growth and civic optimism, while a controversial urban renewal project in the late 1990s and a tagging crew’s challenges for primacy bespoke blight and civic decline. Internal modifications demonstrate demographic dynamism and illuminate ethnoracial contests over time as incoming religious and immigrant residents altered their houses to suit their needs or culture and “old timers,” white and Latino, responded with displays of whiteness and citizenship.
42 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
PAPER SESSION C
Session C1: Heritage and Preservation Chair: Andrew Hurley, University of Missouri-St. Louis Comment: Dan Campo, Morgan State University
Gustavo Giovannoni’s Urban Conservation Randall Mason, University of Pennsylvania
Gustavo Giovannoni was an Italian architect, engineer, planner/urban designer, and conservation scholar active in the early 20th century (1873-1947). Born and based in Rome, he was a leading figure in Italian urbanism and conservation as large cities everywhere in the industrialized world struggled to accommodate both modernization and conservation of urban fabric. Nowhere was this balance more momentous, problematic and prominent than in Rome.
Italians have long been regarded as leaders in theory and practice of conservation – art, architectural and urban – though not as leaders in planning. Architecturally, Italians were among the minor vanguards of Modernism. The synthesis Giovannoni achieved in the first decades of the 20th century, and his leadership of broader movements bridging these disciplines, deserves attention.
Gustavo Giovannoni was trained as an engineer and architect and worked across a range of scales and project types: from the restoration of individual buildings and building elements, to the design of new buildings, urban conservation plans for large districts, and the design of new garden suburbs on the periphery. His career as a teacher and writer and editor left an impressive record of published work; he is regarded in Italy (most of his work has not been translated) as a pioneer and leader of Italian urbanism and conservation in the 1910s and 20s – though his path somewhat diverged from that of his collaborator Marcello Piacentini in the era of Fascist control.
Giovannoni championed “ambientismo” (valorization of context) and architettura minore (vernacular architecture) as values to be squared with the necessary modernization of urban fabric (in Rome and cities across Italy). He formulated an urban design and conservation strategy he called “diradamento”—a term referring to “thinning,” as applied to a forest. Giovannoni’s diradamento combined careful demolition, restoration and conservation to sustain the historic character of old districts while adjusting them for modern function in terms of mobility, hygiene, and connectivity. Today’s Rome bears Giovannoni’s subtle but certain imprint – a contrast to the massive interventions, both destructive and creative, championed by Mussolini.
Giovannoni’s work and career was confined to Italy, but he was linked intellectually to international movements in urban conservation (he was an avid follower of Camillo Sitte and Charles Buls), garden city/suburb design (working in the vein of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin), and conservation theory (continuing the synthetic thinking of Boito, and authoring the 1931 Athens Charter). His work also paralleled the career of some American
43 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 practitioners of the same period – Grosvenor Atterbury, Irving Gill – simultaneously practicing and promoting serious engagement with architectural and urban history as well as modernization. This paper will present a sampling of Giovannoni’s work across the planning, design and conservation fields, with the purpose of foregrounding his holistic, fully integrated strategy of urban conservation – a reconciliation of conservation, creativity and development that has historical significance as well as resonance in today’s divergent field of urbanism.
Beyond Rust and Rockefeller: Preserving Cleveland’s African American Heritage Stephanie Ryberg Webster
In recent decades, the preservation of sites associated with African American communities has held a tenuous place in the historic preservation field. On one hand, preservationists actively recognize that under-designation is rampant and have worked to engage communities of color in heritage work. On the other hand, the field retains its high standards about architectural merit and integrity, which disadvantages the official eligibility (i.e. to the National Register of Historic Places or on local historic registers) of many African American sites due to years of deterioration and neglect. Further complicating this matter are perceptions about the cost and meaning of historic designation and a general apprehension about government intervention in low-income areas.
This paper uses the case study of Cleveland, Ohio to analyze three key questions: (1) Why is the under-designation for African American heritage sites still rampant? (2) What is the contemporary process for preserving these sites? And, (3) What are the tensions and opportunities that arise when working to preserve the heritage of urban African American communities? To do so, I draw on the current work of the Cleveland Restoration Society (CRS), which is sponsoring “legacy project” dedicated to identifying, surveying and registering properties associated with the heritage of Cleveland’s African American community.
Using key person interviews and primary source material, the paper contextualizes CRS’ “legacy project” within the larger dialogue about African American heritage preservation. The paper adds to our understanding about using historic preservation in predominantly African American (and often low-income/disinvested) neighborhoods. Ultimately, the paper questions the applicability and usefulness of ingrained preservation standards when working in places without high architectural value or material integrity, but with rich cultural heritage and historic significance.
Session C2: Saving Downtown Chair: Winifred Newman, Florida International University Comment: Winifred Newman, Florida International University
Business Improvement Areas: The Case of Bloor West Village Melissa Charenko, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Over 60,000 Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) exist worldwide. Generally, BIAs
44 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 seek to revitalize their shopping districts, finance services, and improve and promote their area. The first BIA started in Toronto’s Bloor West Village in 1970 and its model is now employed worldwide. Enabling legislation is found in Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, South Africa and the United States and the concept has spread to other parts of the globe including Japan, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. In Canada, there are over 300 such districts, with 230 areas in Ontario and 71 in the City of Toronto alone, representing more than 28,000 businesses there. Despite the global popularity of BIAs, there is a lot of controversy about what they have or have not achieved. Some boosters argue that BIAs can revitalize urban streetscapes and allow small retailers to compete with urban malls. Opponents disagree and allege that BIAs are an unnecessary burden on small businesses because they achieve few tangible results. They have also been condemned by some activists for their removal of the poorest and most marginalized citizens, as the drive up rents and help initiate urban renewal projects. Amidst this controversy, it is time to revisit the original BIA. In order to do this, my paper uses historical data and interviews with some of the main players in the Bloor West Village BIA in an attempt to determine the origins and legacy of this organization and the many others like it.
The Marriage of Art and Green: Exploring the Role of Public-Private Partnerships in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park Amanda Johnson, Boise State University
Property-based arts economic development (PAED) has been advocated as a mechanism for urban revitalization leading public, private, nonprofit, and community players to champion arts districts, creative office parks, artisanal incubators, and cultural anchor institutions in cities of all sizes and locations. However, few studies have assessed the implementation intricacies of such efforts and how they get done and under what conditions. In particular, research has largely overlooked how these projects fit within the trajectory of planning policy and development cultures. This paper offers a history of the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, Washington, and explores how the Trust for Public Land and the Seattle Art Museum created an alliance to redevelop a contaminated site along Elliot Bay into a public green space amidst development pressures and past failures. The story is framed against a broader framework of how PAED partnerships function and whether they are markedly differently then existing urban political models of behavior. This paper takes a longitudinal, qualitative approach and finds that this strategic nonprofit partnership capitalized on a critical moment to change the face of the Elliot Bay waterfront through building civic capacity and formulating a politically protected implementation strategy. Overall, this analysis provides a robust exploration of how advocates of arts and green economic development engaged in urban revitalization.
Unbuilding the Loop: Obsolescence and Business District Relocation during the 1920s and 1930s Booms Rachel Weber, University of Illinois at Chicago
The commercial real estate booms of the 1920s and 2000s in Chicago’s Loop allow a comparative study of the concept of obsolescence—a notion introduced in the early twentieth- century by appraisers that office buildings have a “useful and profitable life” of 25 to 40 years. Both periods of frenzied real estate speculation shifted the Loop’s main office building district as
45 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 the majority of new office towers were built along LaSalle Street in the 1920s and then along South Wacker Drive in the 2000s. Despite sluggish growth, developers of both periods kept building and Chicago-based tenants flocked to their skyscrapers, which served as an advertisement for their wealth and status. In the process, office buildings of the recent past— many of which just 25 years earlier boasted the latest designs and technologies—were denigrated as obsolete, plundered for tenants, and left to languish. Survival was dependent on modernization or adaptive reuse, and when all else failed, buildings were demolished.
In answering the question of whether the construct of obsolescence changed during the booms of the 1920s and 2000s, this paper will examine the drivers behind new skyscraper construction/tenant relocation of both periods and the impact of the new towers on the recent past towers left behind. During both booms real estate actors relied heavily on the discourse of obsolescence to justify new construction, demolition, and relocation – as well as the public interventions aimed at maintaining the Loop as a premier destination for business, shopping and recreation during a period of increasing competition from outlying commercial districts (1920s) and other global cities (2000s). By inserting the topic at the obsolescence at the center of a study of Chicago’s downtown development during these two periods, this paper aims to highlight how attitudes toward creative destruction among a variety of constituencies—from developers to appraisers to city planners—had a direct impact on redefining the Loop’s urban landscape as it transitioned first from a Victorian to a modern downtown (1920s) and then from a regional to a global center (2000s).
Both booms resulted in uneven development – the shifting of commercial activity and value from older submarkets to newer ones. Like a multi-dimensional game of musical chairs, the westward movement of new construction to LaSalle Street (1920s) and South Wacker Drive (2000s) catalyzed a series of business moves until specific types of buildings and submarkets were left with fewer occupants when the music stopped. The unprecedented spate of downtown building demolition that took place during the 1930s, mainly along Dearborn and streets along the Loop’s periphery, lowered the density of the Loop for the first time in its history. While a plethora of buildings of all types were razed for parking lots, low-rise garages and one- to two- story commercial buildings called “taxpayers,” others underwent highly publicized modernization campaigns. During the 2000s, new construction along Wacker Drive and city subsidies pulled tenants from LaSalle Street and the East Loop, leaving office buildings from the previous boom of the 1980s with vacancy rates of at least 40 percent. During each of the booms under examination, the public sector, real estate brokers and professional associations such as BOMA played critical intermediating roles in moving capital and tenants to new favored destinations.
Churches and Condominiums: Who Benefits? An Analysis of Density Benefits in North York Centre, Toronto Philip Morgan, McMaster University
The city of Toronto recently surpassed Chicago as the fourth largest city in North America; the strength of the Toronto’s booming condominium market was largely responsible for this. In 2011, for example, the Toronto’s Census Metropolitan Area reached a record high in annual new condominium sales, eclipsing its previous record of 22, 654 set in 2007 by twenty-
46 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 four percent. While much of this development was concentrated in the downtown core, the North York Centre region of Toronto, or “downtown’s uptown” as some have called it, was also vital to these changes.
As one of four centres designated by the City as vital to "achieving the strategic growth objectives of the Official Plan,” North York Centre is a focal point of smart growth planning in Toronto. My research focuses on the last fifty years of planning and development in North York in an effort to assess the social and environmental impacts of high-rise condominiums on their surrounding communities. My paper, which examines density benefits negotiations between local churches and condominium developers, demonstrates the complexities of Toronto's zoning by- laws and highlights the important role that churches play in shaping Toronto's uptown landscape.
Session C3: The Shifting Imperatives of Planning Chair: D. Bradford Hunt, Roosevelt University Comment: Larry Bennett, DePaul University
The Judicial Impetus for Shaping Metropolitan Growth: The New Jersey Case Martin A. Bierbaum, Independent Scholar
Unlike the state planning impetus in most states where state planning established a foothold during the last quarter of the 20th century, in New Jersey that impetus emanated from the New Jersey Supreme Court’s stance on civil rights issues rather than an expanding environmental movement. The New Jersey Supreme Court sought to chart its own course based upon state rather than Federal constitutional grounds to address issues related to both residential and school desegregation. These New Jersey Supreme Court efforts appeared to be a response to accumulating evidence of diminished Federal government resolve to reduce racial barriers in the face of growing public resistance in the 1970s.
The New Jersey Supreme Court seemed to be extending the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education at the same time that the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to be retreating from or at least seriously circumscribing its earlier position of terminating official racial segregation. In the 1970s, the Brown decision was evolving as both a landmark of social justice, but also as a symbol of the limits of judicially led social reform.
In addition to challenging established legal doctrine to achieve its desired ends, the New Jersey Supreme Court also pointed to the importance of sound planning practice to achieve its ends. The Court seemed to hint at the need for planning even if it may not have fully comprehended its implications.
The New Jersey Supreme Court’s land--use and school finance decisions eventually led to the state legislature’s enactment of the New Jersey State Planning Act, Fair Housing Act, and Quality Education Act. These acts resulted in more than three decades of executive branch policy--making and wider social and political activity with respect to all three – state planning, fair housing and school finance—but with at best mixed results. To what extent was
47 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 the state’s metropolitan settlement pattern altered by this judicially induced public policy- -making?
This paper will discuss the key judicial decisions, sketch the nature of the legislative and executive branch responses to the judicial decision--making as well as the wider social impact from the 1970s through the current period in the three substantive areas. To what extent has New Jersey’s experiences provided evidence of the limits of judicially--led reform? The paper will also provide alternative explanations for the mixed results as well as important lessons learned for future planning and public policy--making activities.
Housing Reform in the Private City: Lessons from Chicago Joel Rast, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Most historical studies of urban politics trace the origins of contemporary urban governing arrangements to the post-WWII era. During this period, urban power structures were reconfigured to reflect the new alliance between business leaders and city officials around the physical redevelopment of the city. Scholars identify the postwar “urban crisis” as the cause of this shakeup; slums, blight, and falling property values pushed business elites and city officials to act. Because the break with prewar governing arrangements is seen as abrupt, complete, and caused by exogenous factors, little attention is typically paid to the prewar period. The assumption is that we don’t need to know much about the prewar period to explain why postwar governing arrangements took the form they did.
Like other historical studies of urban politics, I locate the origins of contemporary governing arrangements in the postwar era. But I make a different argument about how those arrangements came into being. In brief, I argue that the “urban crisis” was not a postwar phenomenon, but instead dates back to the turn of the century. Poor housing and slum conditions in Chicago prompted a series of initiatives by civic leaders during the first half of the 20th century to prevent the spread of blight. These efforts took place within a particular division of labor between state and market, captured neatly by Warner (1968) with his notion of the “private city.” In this framework, the housing problem would be addressed primarily by the private sector, with regulation and oversight by public officials. Relations between public and private sectors were adversarial in this system.
If this argument about a longer-term urban crisis is correct, then what requires explanation is not the “response to crisis” following WWII but rather the shift from one pattern of response prior to WWII to another following the war. In Chicago, this shift involved a fundamental reworking of the division of labor between state and market, replacing the adversarial relationship between public and private sectors with a partnership approach to urban development. These two approaches can be understood as “policy paradigms” (see Hall 1993). Following Hall and Kuhn (1970), I identify key developments during the period from 1900-1945 that undermined the coherence of the “private city” framework and created opportunities for change. I argue that explanations of shifts in urban governing arrangements should focus not simply on moments of crisis and resolution, but on longer-term contests in which ad hoc attempts to reconcile institutional arrangements with new governing demands become problematic and create space for new ideas and policy solutions to emerge and attract support.
48 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
The “Progressive City” Over Time Pierre Clavel, Cornell University
The idea of the “progressive city” has changed over time, and what is proposed here is a survey of what these changes were, how they occurred. My plan is to explore two heretofore unexploited data sources: a collection of Readers and reports from the Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies in the 1970s; and a compendium of 1160 state and local “progressive” legislation, model ordinances, and other resources collected in 2012 by the ALICE project of the Center on Wisconsin Strategies.
There seem to have been three main configurations, appearing in sequence during successive periods: Early 20th century progressivism (1890--1920) began with mayors like Hazen Pingree (Detroit, 1890s) and Tom Johnson (Cleveland 1900-- 1910) and culminated in the city manager movement (ca 1920). A second set began in the 1970s with cities like Berkeley, Madison and Hartford and extending through the 1980s in Santa Monica; Burlington VT culminating with Harold Washington in Chicago (1983--87) and Ray Flynn in Boston (1983- -93). We are yet to see whether a similar set of city initiatives is emerging in the aftermath of the 2008 Obama election when, in the face of increasing inequality and intense but uneven right wing resistance, the Center for Wisconsin Strategies initiated the remarkable ALICE project which collected over 1100 examples of “progressive” legislation, model laws and idea pieces from hundreds of cities and state governments and posted them in www.alicelaw.org - indicating at least a diffuse presence through the nation at state and local levels.
While the use of the term “progressive” changed over time, one constant was the determination to link redistributive and inclusionary ideas to a mainstream constituency – usually a necessity when people with radical backgrounds sought public office. The results are still unevenly explored after 1920 -- hardly at all for the hundreds of activists who appeared at the annual and regional meetings of the Conference – though there is enough evidence to suggest they could be transformative of public policy as cities experimented with industrial policy in Chicago in the 1980s, affordable housing trust funds in Boston, rent control in Santa Monica and Community Land Trusts in Burlington VT. The ALICE database, while not intended to provide historical perspective, nevertheless extends our viewpoint to a century--long trajectory. The question addressed here will be how the compromises inherent in progressive initiatives were worked out and changed over time in response to national economic and demographic changes and changes in public opinion.
Session C4: Elite Spaces Chair: Kristin Larsen, University of Florida Comment: Audience
Becoming “Ochre Point”: The Origins of a Gendered Landscape in Newport, RI Catherine W. Zipf, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Much as been written about gendered landscapes and the subversive ways in which
49 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 women created space for themselves within the 19th century American city. In the Gilded Age, upper class women constructed buildings and landscapes to advance and secure their social position. They also used these spaces as seats of power that stood apart from and functioned independently of the male establishment. Yet, despite the importance of gendered landscapes, we know very little about how they were constructed.
The Ochre Point neighborhood in Newport, RI, offers a unique opportunity to examine the formation and development of one such landscape from its beginnings. Initially pastureland, much of the area was owned by two male landowners, William Beach Lawrence and William Shepard Wetmore. In the 1870s, society women began purchasing lots from the Lawrence and Wetmore estates and building houses for use during the summer society season. These women guided the development of the street pattern, determined its architectural identity, and constructed elaborate landscapes that highlighted Newport’s natural resources. They also engineered the experience of movement and the lines of vision by constructing walls, gates, outbuildings, and other landscape features. This paper examines the process and timeline by which the area shifted from male ownership to female ownership, the impact of female ownership on the buildings and landscapes of the neighborhood, and the implications of that legacy today.
Mary Foote Henderson and the Making of Meridian Hill, Washington, DC Kimberly Protho Williams, DC Historic Preservation Office
Architectural Historian, Kim Williams proposes to present a paper on the development of Sixteenth Street and the Meridian Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C. by visionary developer Mary Foote Henderson. For three decades, around the turn-of-the-twentieth century, the indefatigable Henderson campaigned for and financed the construction of the area’s grand mansions and foreign legations, transforming the area from a rugged and under-developed post-Civil War settlement into an impressive gateway to the nation’s capital.
Sixteenth Street, running directly north from the White House is one of the country’s best known urban routes. At 160-feet wide, the street was considered to be one of the “grand avenues” conceived by Pierre L’Enfant in his 1791 Plan of Washington City. As the city grew beyond its original boundaries, new sections of Sixteenth Street were cut and laid, including through Meridian Hill, located just beyond the city’s original limits. While the evolution of Sixteenth Street spans more than 150 years and is the product of many urban planning developments, city beautification efforts, personal visions and financiers, it is, more than any combination of these things, the singular imagination and influence of Mary Foote Henderson.
From the late 1880s until her death in 1931, Henderson worked to define and maintain Sixteenth Street as the “finest residential avenue in America.” Often referring to it as “my Sixteenth Street,” Henderson successfully lobbied for landscaping along its route, including the formidable European-inspired Meridian Hill Park, and pushed to institute zoning regulations that had a direct impact on development patterns for the length of the street. Most importantly, Mary Henderson personally financed and constructed the grand mansions and foreign legations of Meridian Hill, creating a socially prominent enclave of wealthy statesmen and foreign emissaries.
50 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
As proposed, this paper will discuss the history of Meridian Hill prior to the arrival of Mary Henderson, tracing its development roots to the early nineteenth century, and its post- -Civil War subdivision as Meridian Hill. It will then detail Henderson’s successful Congressional lobbying efforts to build the formidable European-style Meridian Hill Park that became the framework around which she created a socially prominent residential enclave of wealthy statesmen and foreign emissaries. The presentation will illustrate the eclectic collection of Beaux Arts mansions of exceptional architectural value built between 1905 and 1928 and designed by architect George Oakley Totten, Jr. The paper will end on present-day historic preservation efforts in Meridian Hill.
Civic-City: Becoming Ourselves in Flexible Public Space Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, The New School
We become ourselves as citizens not in private spaces, but in public ones. How can the flexible design of public open spaces support the formation of our public selves? In this paper, I use my perspective as curator and research director for the exhibition Civic-city : Becoming ourselves in flexible public space (opening 2014 at New York's Center for Architecture) to reflect on how some public spaces are designed to be flexible so as to support individuals becoming civic actors.
The exhibition builds its conception of flexibility from the author’s work on everyday public spaces, considering that public spaces allow us to have different kinds of “conversations” : internal conversations, semi-private conversations with others that create community, and external conversations with a big idea - such as memorials, protests, etc. In this exhibition, public spaces that support at least two, and possibly three of these kinds of “conversations” will be considered as flexible, and explored to understand how this flexibility occurs and how it was planned for. The paper, and exhibition, argue that this kind of flexibility, responsiveness and openness is a particularly important, though often under- addressed, aspect of public space design. Stepping back to address what public space is in fact for, the presentation will explore how openness supports some of the central purposes for a public space within society: making space that enables political dissent, cultural reproduction, and simple everyday engagements with other people that build connection to place.
This paper will focus on the historical precedents for flexibility in public space, a framing that will ground the exhibition itself. Though we may not find a great many historical spaces that were meant to be physically changeable, I believe we will find that spaces may have physical and social qualities that support the flexibility of multiple layers of conversations, and which are instructive for future planning. For example, we will look at the spaces in front of Franciscan and Dominican churches, often intended for outside preaching, and which have now turned into public squares that support a great many secular public and intimate “conversations.” The paper will also focus on how uses and evolutions over time to public space have influenced planners’ conceptions of how to create new flexible public spaces, or how to intervene in existing spaces.
The presentation will reflect on how these ideas can be explored within the form of an
51 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 exhibition, and as such, the presentation will show some of the exhibition strategies used to make visible the complexity of use, intention, design and change in these spaces. In particular, the project focuses on understanding which physical and social qualities of these spaces support this openness, and the ways in which design, and ideas of intentional incompleteness, can further foster a kind of civic flexibility.
Session C5: Toronto Metropolitan Planning c. 1950 to 1970 Chair: David Amborski, Ryerson University Comment: Richard Harris, McMaster University
Toronto’s Golden Age of Planning: Toronto’s Metropolitan Plan of 1959: An Overview Richard White, UTM
The municipality of Metropolitan Toronto was formed by the government of Ontario in 1954 through the partial amalgamation of the city of Toronto with twelve of its surrounding municipalities, some of which were well established peripheral urban centres and some large rural townships included to accommodate future urban development. This was followed, as expected, by a great spurt of growth that saw the suburban population around the city increase by about one million in a single generation. Along with this growth came the creation, on a metropolitan scale, of new transportation infrastructure, public parks, and water and sewer services, as well as new metropolitan institutions for public education, public transit, and public housing. All of these were based on a redistribution of public revenues across the metropolitan area that was quite unprecedented.
Another institution created by the new metropolitan government was a metropolitan planning board which, having been given a substantial budget, hired a staff of professional planners who developed a comprehensive plan for the Toronto metropolitan area, completed and released in draft form in 1959. Though never made an official plan under provincial planning law, it stands to this day as one of the Toronto region’s most significant plans.
This paper will present an overview of the key elements of that plan and show the many ways that its legacy is still visible on the urban and suburban landscape.
Toronto and the Institutionalization of Planning 1946-1960 Andre Sorenson and Paul Hess, University of Toronto
The objective of this planning is to make possible by wise arrangement and control the most profitable use of urban land; thus the capital that is invested in the buildings on it may be maintained in value, and those who live upon it may thrive more abundantly. This sort of planning is an economy; it is no more nor less than forethought, a view of more than just a piecemeal development.
Dana Porter, a Progressive-Conservative Party cabinet minister for the newly established ministry of Planning and Development, in a speech to the Ontario Municipal Association, 1946.
52 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
The institutionalization of planning as a regular municipal function came relatively late to Toronto, Ontario. In Canada, the definition of municipal powers is firmly in the hands of the provinces and Ontario kept a tight reign on the ability of its cities to regulate development before World-War Two. Starting in 1912 with the Cities and Suburbs Act the Province of Ontario slowly, over a period of decades, expanded the power of cities to oversee and regulate land subdivision in order to allow for “orderly development,” but consistently resisted lobbying by planning reformers to allow cities to establish comprehensive zoning bylaws and city plans.
This changed immediately following World War Two when a Progressive- Conservative Provincial government passed the Ontario Planning Act in 1946. In doing so, the Province moved planning not only in line with where it had been in much of the United States a generation previously, but even beyond by requiring the institutionalization of planning as a core part of municipal governance within a legally binding, Provincially led system including requirements for planning commissions, comprehensive zoning bylaws, and legally binding Official Plans.
The Province went even further with the establishment of the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (Metro) in 1954, creating a new powerful institution that clearly put the Toronto region into the forefront of North American planning. Metro was established as an “upper-tier” municipality designed to tackle the problems of rapid urban growth, particularly the inability of suburban governments to fund infrastructure. Within this framework, the local, lower tier, municipalities were responsible for developing detailed plans and zoning bylaws consistent with Metro goals, and performing day-to-day development review and permitting.
Thus, in a very short period, Toronto moved from a having a liberal property regime, with very few regulatory controls to development, to what may have been the most hierarchical, fully articulated planning system in North America, but one that was always justified within a conservative political rhetoric that described planning as rationalizing, not shaping markets. This paper uses archival evidence such as political speeches, government committee meeting minutes, newspaper accounts, and planning documents to explore the multiple, complex reasons leading to the critical juncture that created Toronto’s modern planning institutions, and the contradictions between the political language of liberalism and the reality of the new powerful planning system. It then traces the development regimes established in three lower-tier municipalities that were part of Metro Toronto, to understand variations in local planning institutions, and how these resulted in different types of new urban from.
The Valley and the Road: Building Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway Jennifer Bonnell, University of Guelph
Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway (DVP), constructed between 1958 and 1966, capitalized upon the natural corridor functions provided by one of the city’s most iconic landscapes, the Lower Don River Valley. This paper examines the history of the parkway
53 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 project and its repercussions for the valley, and the city as a whole. The grand fulfillment of half a century of visions for a roadway through the valley, the DVP used valley lands to transform the city, opening the rural lands northeast of the centre to residential development. Following the line of least geographical resistance, it was a “friction-free” development in more ways than one: few homes stood in the way of the proposed road; few existing roads required incorporation; and few people objected. For members of the Don Valley Conservation Association (DVCA), however, the project spelled the end for a vision of the valley as a vital urban green space—a refuge for wildlife and a restorative retreat for harried urban residents. For DVCA founder Charles Sauriol, a cottager in the valley and long-time champion of conservation causes, the project would strike especially close to home, resulting in the expropriation of a portion of his valley holdings and the bulldozing of his family’s beloved cottage retreat. This paper explores competing visions for the Don River Valley as a “corridor” and a “place” in this period, and their role in shaping the valley, and the city, as we know them today.
Session C6: Real Estate Development and the Twentieth Century City Chair: Susanne Schindler, The New School & Columbia University Comment: Susanne Schindler, The New School & Columbia University
National Types/Local Variations: The Small-Builder-Developer’s Creative Role in the Production of America’s Common Housing, 1870-2000 Thomas Hubka, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
In varied residential landscapes across the country, a limited range of locally popular versions of national housing types has been the norm for more than a century. That houses may appear uniform in broad national survey but turn out to be quite unpredictably different in local construction is perhaps obvious to most housing observers. But the reasons why this is the case is not so well-known, nor easy to explain. This paper analyzes this “persistence of the local” from the perspective of small builder-developers—those responsible for constructing the vast majority of American housing in most periods. The presentation highlights their seldom recognized role in creating local and regional diversity of common housing types despite the standardization and modernization of the house building industry during the last century.
This paper, based on historical case-studies of housing production in varied residential communities, analyzes the range of local factors, such as building traditions, material distribution, and marketing and land development practices that act to influence the production of distinct, locally dominant, variants of nationally recognized housing types. For example, in pre-WWII regional comparison, concentrations of distinctly different dominant house types can be observed in related cities, such as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. The presence of these distinct regional differences, however, does not negate significant overall national uniformity in technological and design standardization since the Civil War—only that this standardization has not inhibited equally strong traditions of localized variations of national trends and standards. Although the differences between the housing types of major metropolitan regions have narrowed within the last fifty years, this “persistence of the local” remains a surprisingly significant determinant to localized variants of national building norms.
54 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Based on historical studies of popular housing construction, this paper evaluates the design production methods of the small-scale builder-developers whose consistent “speculative vernacular methods” typically reinforces a “local consensus” of house and plan types. While common builders in all periods are influenced by many sources (both national and local, professional and vernacular, and high-tech and low-budget), it will be demonstrated that their typical method is to cautiously refine and replicate a familiar repertoire of locally proven prototypes to produce surprisingly uniform local consensus. It is a method far closer to the apprenticeship training in a medieval guild than the pursuit of avant-garde style in an architectural design firm. While this “vernacular method” is not resistant to change, its strength has always relied upon cautious experimentation with new ideas and techniques and reliance on tested traditional solutions. Despite a long history of professional and academic criticism, these speculative methods of local builder-developers have largely produced the vast underlying unity and consistent local variety of America’s common houses.
The Merchant Builder’s Vernacular: The Evolution of Postwar Subdivision Design Andrew H. Whittemore, University of Texas at Arlington
The investigation of single-family subdivision design in the second half of the twentieth century has been limited. Consequently, an understanding is lacking of both (1) why postwar builders failed to mass-produce pre-war models that they often held in high regard, and (2) why developers so often repeated models criticized as slurbs, sprawl, or any other number of derogatory names. The matter of single-family subdivision, as Ned Eichler documented in “The Merchant Builders” (MIT Press, 1982), is more complex than any supposed ignorance or selfishness among developers, involving issues of demographics, tastes, land, technology, layers of regulation, company organization, the environment, infrastructure, and financing. How these matters specifically played into design in the second half of the twentieth century has not been addressed comprehensively. Common characterizations of postwar subdivision downplay what is at closer look a great amount of diversity in design prototypes, which in the last half of the twentieth century included detached housing, new communities, townhome developments, cooperative arrangements, cluster development, mixed use developments, and patio subdivisions among others. This paper will investigate both creativity and repetition in single-family subdivision design in second half of the twentieth century as a product of the interplay of the diverse forces Eichler discussed. It will ask how these factors contributed to creativity, and how these factors contributed to the repetition of established models. The paper will draw from professional publications, secondary literature, and the investigation of individual cases in the Dallas, Boston, and Los Angeles areas.
Architects, Bankers, Planners, and Politicians: Mexico’s Banco Nacional Hipotecario de Urbanización y Obras Públicas and the Financial Solution to the Urban Housing Crisis Sarah Selvidge, UC Berkeley
Access to adequate housing is one of the central problems of rapid urbanization. National politics driven by the desire to create growth, especially through industrialization, often lack sufficient planning for its consequences. The peripheral neighborhoods of unregulated self- construction that have grown up as a response to the lack of available and affordable housing has been the subject of a growing literature, both contemporary and historical; a number of studies
55 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 look at this process in Latin America, focusing on legal rights, institutions and the meaning of citizenship (e.g. Fischer 2008, Holston 2008). This paper seeks to complement these inquiries by analyzing the history of the creation of mechanisms to support the financing of housing for poor residents as an aspect of urban policy and planning during the period of rapid growth and industrialization in mid-20th century Mexico City, arguing that these mechanisms changed the relationship between citizens and state institutions. In it, I trace the formation of Mexico’s National Bank of Mortgages, Urbanization and Public Works (Banco Nacional Hipotecatio de Urbanización y Obras Públicas or BNHUOP), a major player in the financing and building of public works throughout the 20th century.
The BNHUOP was intended to assess and address Mexico’s growing housing problem by helping to provide shelter for the masses of workers and their families within the city during its peak of industrial growth, simultaneously preventing the proliferation of unhealthy slums. Inspired by the tenets of the CIAM, the architects and planners at the BNHUOP sought to transform the lives of urban dwellers through the implementation of modernist architectural and planning principles. This intended social impact was central to the collaboration between a small group of radical architect-planners and the state, which reached its height during the mid- century. These projects were understood by the architects as a means of systematically addressing the country’s most dire social problems, and presented by the state as a fulfillment of its revolutionary promise.
I focus on two aspects of the BNHUOP that were especially important in shaping the course of housing policy in Mexico: first, the agreement between these architects and the government to solve the housing problem through financing and, second, the use of sociological study in the formulation of housing policy. Ironically, both of these aspects eventually led to an abandonment of the principles that defined the initial approach of the BNHUOP’s founders. The interest in financial planning as a solution to the city’s housing problem led to a less central role for architects in the future of urban and regional planning and it was through the BNHUOP’s extensive sociological studies that policy- makers began to favor the popular desire for individual home ownership among Mexicans, even in urban settings. I argue that these processes were important not only to the future of planning in Mexico, but also that the BNHUOP played an important role in national politics, helping to define the role of the state as a provider or financer of housing. State financing of housing for workers was framed as a Revolutionary goal, but in practice contributed to larger patterns of urban development that presented a sort of middle path between the extremes of dense urban communal housing and subsidization of suburban growth.
Corporate Real Estate Development, 1960-1974: Origins and Impacts Andrew Wiese, San Diego State University
Urban historians know a great deal about real estate finance and development in the early postwar United States. Through their work, the sagas of federal housing policy, flamboyant community builders, and mass suburbia have become basic elements of historical memory in this period. We know much less about the evolution of real estate development in the decades that followed or the impacts of these changes in American life.
56 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
This paper focuses on the 1960s and early 1970s, which were a critical moment in this evolution. Using examples from San Diego, California, it outlines changes in real estate development and finance and sketches a set of impacts that stretched from local politics, through regional development, to fluctuations in the national and global economies. In San Diego, as in many U.S. cities, the 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a new merger between real estate development and high-finance, a shift characterized by massive investments by Fortune 500 companies and other large institutions, and by the growth of the first nationwide home building firms, which were capable of development on an unprecedented scale. Nationally, these changes produced the all- time peak in U.S. housing starts in 1972, and a housing bubble that burst in the crisis of 1973-74. Regionally, they were implicated in the re-investment of industrial and financial capital from the Northeast to the Sunbelt and in the debacle of corporate bankruptcies such as the Penn Central Railroad. Local effects were also far reaching. In California, the era of corporate real estate development underlay accelerated sprawl, incalculable environmental destruction, spikes in prices and taxes, and political insurgencies centered on the environment, growth, and taxes.
In the short term, many of these changes foundered on the 1973-74 recession. Direct investment by the Fortune 500s shrank dramatically, for instance, but in the long term, the integration of real estate development and finance on a national and global scale represented the direction of the future. Effects visible in outline by the early Seventies would become increasingly commonplace in the decades to come.
Session C7: Port Cities Chair: Nikhil Rao, Wellesley College Comment: Elizabeth Macdonald, UC Berkeley
Urban Mega-Projects, Cost Overruns and Place: The Case of the Prince’s Dock, Bombay Robert Lewis and Matti Siemiatycki, University of Toronto
Urban infrastructure mega-projects have been plagued by systematic cost overruns and construction delays. In this paper we argue that place- based dynamics are critical to influencing the accuracy of cost and time estimates on large-scale urban infrastructures. Drawing on the historical case study of Bombay’s Prince’s Dock construction in the late 1800s, we show how place-specific factors forced project planners to make realistic construction cost estimates, to closely scrutinize ongoing work, and to deliver the project on budget and ahead of schedule. Important dimensions identified include the degree of contestation between different orders of government, the level of support or opposition from urban elites, the basis of the reputation of the project champion, the exploitability of the labour force, and the source and structure of the project financing.
Evolution of the Waterfront: Planning, Development and Water Management in Jakarta since the 17th Century Christopher Silver, University of Florida
Jakarta, Indonesia was established as the Dutch trading center called Batavia in
57 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Southeast Asia in the early 17th century and to do so as place identified by its connection to waterways. Thirteen rivers (and their tributaries) created the delta region where the Dutch planted their major port city on the Java Sea and the city builders incorporated water into its essential fabric. Between the 17th century and the early twentieth century, Batavia’s waterfront gradually was transformed from the gateway to the Queen City into its backwater, a process facilitated by the dominant governmental, industrial , service and residential functions shifting to the interior regions of this expanding metropolis. The transformation was guided by a planning process that neglected the ecological foundations of the city, that regarded the waterfront area as the city’s backwater, and which gave scant attention to issues of water management in this delta region. Beginning in the 1980s, there was renewed attention to Jakarta’s historic waterfront area, in large part because of the development potential that it offered. At the same time, the city began to experience in an unprecedented way the disastrous consequences of insufficient attention to water management. One result was catastrophic and nearly annual flooding that plagued especially the historic waterfront area. The attention to the development potential along the waterfront needed to be balanced against more serious attention to the previously neglected water management needs of the metropolis. In addition, the dislocations that resulted from waterfront development brought increasing challenges from a civil society empowered by the transformation of Indonesia from an authoritarian regime to a more democratic society. This introduced a new set of stakeholders to challenge some of the planning efforts aimed at sustaining waterfront development and redressing the decades of neglect of the city’s ecological systems. In recent years, the waterfront of Jakarta has reemerged as contested space, where the conflicting agendas of development, sustainability and environmental justice in this megacity are being played out.
This paper will make it possible to understand the changing character and functions of this delta city’s waterfront region over an extended period, to identify the key stakeholders in this process, and in the process to better understand the implications of current strategies to reinvent the waterfront for the 21st century. The value of an assessment spanning such an extended period is that it allows one to assess this unique and important spatial component of the city through the lens of the broader transformations that affected urbanization overall. The focus will narrow in the latter half of the paper to assess the specific plans for the waterfront that were formulated during the early 1990s in order to resurrect the historic coastal area of the city, but also the use this development process to create a waterfront city fitted to the 21st century.
Session C8: The Archives Write Back: Digital Archives, Damaged Communities, and the State Chair: Walter Greason, Independent Scholar Comment: Walter Greason, Independent Scholar
Knowledge Production on Heritage Websites for Sites of Confinement Lynne Horiuchi, Independent Scholar
In developing a website project titled “Mapping and Building for the Sites of Japanese
58 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
American Confinement,” I was faced with projecting onto the internet images relating to forced movement, state agency, and knowledge production. My plan was to create a simple database to upload images of copies of architectural drawings and urban plans created by the U.S. with 70 photos of artifacts from the collection of a local Japanese American historical society. The goal was to provide information about built environments that have nearly all disappeared from sites of confinement that are now developing as educational centers, tourist destinations, and state or national park sites.
In the first section of my talk, I will address the mechanics of creating websites for uploading images on the web and a brief history of the website that I produced with the students in Seth Wachtel’s Community Services Architectural Studio at the University of San Francisco. I will discuss the collaborative work with the Digital Collections Librarian, Zheng Lu, and the students to design the website. The discussion will also include necessary agreements and rights for the use of digital images.
The second part of the talk will address the epistemological challenges of producing knowledge on websites to address the following questions: How may the testimonies of witnesses and their documentation of cognitive and everyday environments be balanced with government documents on a website? And how may the conflicting forces and interests of prisoners and jailers be reported in a way that illuminates governance and social justice in presenting artifacts from this event?
While I will address artistic and architectural production against the archival record and the mechanics of website production to display government archival records, this talk is also an exploration of knowledge production on the web and providing research tools that reflect the complexity of Japanese American confinement during World War II.
The Lakeland Archive: Community Strategies for Cultural Sustainability Mary Corbin Sies, University of Maryland
The Lakeland Community Heritage Project (LCHP) is an all-volunteer historical society formed six years ago and dedicated to recovering and preserving the heritage of a remarkable African American enclave founded in 1890 that was damaged by urban renewal. In 2009, LCHP began collaborating with students in Sies’s Social and Ethnic Issues in Preservation course to document and study Lakeland’s history. The Lakeland Archive is one of the products of that multi-year collaboration; it is a student and community created digital archive, using Omeka software, hosting photographs, oral and video histories, newspaper clippings, deed research, maps, and student research about Lakeland properties, both extant and destroyed.
Despite its importance in Prince George’s County History, Lakeland experienced loss, trauma and forced relocation during a messy urban renewal process that stretched out for more than two decades. Two thirds of the community’s geography and households were “taken” by eminent domain or condemned and most of the promised improvements to Lakeland never materialized. As a result of the state’s destruction of Lakeland’s physical environment, county preservationists have declined to designate what is left of Lakeland for historic district status because the community now lacks sufficient integrity. So this presentation analyzes the efforts
59 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 of LCHP, partnering with UMD classes, to develop alternative preservation practices to sustain their community’s heritage.
The Lakeland Archive is an interesting case study because it is a grassroots, “seat-of the- pants” operation; any under-resourced locale with volunteers passionate about their heritage could follow in Lakelanders’ footsteps. But how well does it work to repair or restore the cultural sustainability that was ruptured when the community was torn apart? The presentation will assess several dimensions of this question: heritage practices, social justice issues, the power of the archive, diversity issues—especially the challenges of a university-community partnership where there is a century-long history of university discrimination toward Lakeland employees and residents, teaching challenges of community-engaged projects, and digital humanities dimensions.
The Soweto HGIS Project: Models for Collaboration and Digital Archive-Making in the “New” South Africa Angel David Nieves, Hamilton College
Few historical geographers of South Africa have taken advantage of the emerging field of the digital humanities when studying the complex spatial dimensions of violence, resistance, and freedom in the making of all-Black townships under the system of apartheid. Employing a recently discovered cache of historical photographs and aerial imagery along with other multimodal primary source documents of the period, faculty and student collaborators have embarked on a new study of the complex spatial history of Soweto. The Soweto HGIS Project – under the sponsorship of Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi), and enlisting scholars and researchers at both Hamilton and Middlebury Colleges – examines the micro- geography of resistance and the layering of meaning and action between the apartheid state and township residents across its built form. SHGIS seeks to build a multi-layered historical geographic information system database that explores the social, economic and political dimensions of urban development under South African apartheid. By documenting across space and time the racial and political ideologies of apartheid within these townships, or Black labor- machines, an important question is raised: can we map residents’ resistance to oppression using GIS? Research suggests that modernism – as expressed through urban planning and architectural design – was upended by the ground-up activism of township residents in the struggle against apartheid. This paper will discuss the early development of the project’s integrated spatial history database/archive used to record and analyze a wider range of spatio- temporal features, both physical and human, of apartheid.
Session C9: Competing Visions of Downtown in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and New York City Chair: Alison Isenberg, Princeton University Comment: Alison Isenberg, Princeton University
“No Definable Bilingual Districts”: Ethnic Enclaves, Orientalism, and the Filipino Condition in Downtown Los Angeles, 1930-1965 Joseph Bernardo, University of Washington
60 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
In my paper, I explore the politics of ethnic enclave development in Los Angeles by focusing on the mission to build a multicultural city and its effects on the Filipino American community. Upon their migration to the United States as colonial subjects, Filipino laborers were ghettoized in a “Little Manila” enclave in downtown Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. During the post-World War II period, however, city officials destroyed any remnants of Little Manila while they concomitantly preserved and revitalized the Chinatown and Little Tokyo neighborhoods in an effort to develop a more multicultural downtown. Although Filipino Americans experienced suburbanization along with Chinese and Japanese American communities, they alone have lacked a distinct ethnic neighborhood that they could claim as their own. Through examining which elements Los Angeles city officials propagated and which ones they destroyed or hid in constructing a new, modern downtown, I convey the new racial lines whites drew in the city in the post-World War II era. I argue that the twin processes of suburbanization and urban renewal erased and filtered the memory of certain groups while concomitantly preserving and revitalizing others.
As part of the multicultural policy of inclusion, constructing the new downtown Los Angeles meant redefining and standardizing ethnic spaces for white consumer tastes. Discourses of assimilation and multiculturalism helped spawn the promotion of ethnic enclaves as tourist destinations in Los Angeles beginning the late 1930s. Using Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism in the development of “New” Chinatown, Olvera Street, and Little Tokyo, I suggest that these racial spaces depended on a perception of Orientalist “otherness” to attract a white suburban consumer clientele. Consequently, whites’ construction of these downtown racial spaces made the preservation of Little Manila an impossibility due to Filipinos’ perceived lack of “otherness” after centuries of Spanish and American colonialism. Little Manilas did not survive in the era of multiculturalism because they did not possess the adequate form of “foreign-ness” in order to be preserved as opposed to that of a Chinatown or Japantown. As a result, various redevelopment projects destroyed what was left of Little Manila. Ultimately, postwar urban renewal determined what (and who) should be “visible” in Los Angeles’s new downtown, and Filipinos were not a part of it. Thus, through examining the imperial logics of economic development and consumption of Los Angeles’s ethnic neighborhoods, the lack of a Little Manila enclave exposes the limitations of multiculturalism itself.
“A $35 Million ‘Hole in the Ground’”: Metropolitan Fragmentation and the Demise of Cleveland’s Downtown Subway Plan, 1953-1959 J. Mark Souther, Cleveland State University
In 1953, voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, approved a $35 million downtown circulator subway by a two-to-one margin. Various plans for subway lines or loops had surfaced several times since the 1900s, but the prospect became more likely after construction began on the city’s first heavy-rail transit line in the early 1950s. The Cleveland Transit Service (CTS) favored the downtown subway as a way to distribute transit riders beyond its single rail station in the Cleveland Union Terminal and to support an extension of rapid-rail service throughout the metropolitan area, which promised to deposit more passengers than the Terminal could handle. CTS also touted the subway as an antidote to downtown traffic congestion and a preferable alternative to freeways alone. Following the 1953 vote, freeway backer and county engineer
61 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Albert Porter turned fighting the subway plan into a personal crusade. In the six years that followed, the three-member board of county commissioners decided the fate of the plan twice, rejecting it in 1957 and again in 1959. Cleveland’s failure to construct a downtown subway stands in counterpoint to Toronto’s inauguration of a new subway system in 1954 and San Francisco’s 1950s planning for the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway network. The Cleveland subway saga remains unexplored by historians, yet it offers an opportunity not only to situate urban mass-transit history in the context of broader midcentury conversations about the future of downtown but also to connect the work of scholars of downtowns with that of the growing historiography that seeks to examine cities and suburbs in a singular metropolitan framework.
Drawing upon newspaper articles, correspondence, public-hearing transcripts, and interviews from the time period, my paper examines the six-year-long subway fight not only as an unconventional midcentury response to traffic congestion, but also as a window into the politics of downtown renewal and influence of metropolitan fragmentation. It reveals deep fissures both within the downtown establishment and between downtown interests on the one hand and outlying neighborhoods and suburbs on the other. In addition to creating a high-profile clash between Porter and the CTS over whether freeways or rapid transit better served an expanding metropolitan area, the subway plan divided downtown merchants into those who saw it as the best hope for holding the line against further losses to suburban competition and those who feared that years of construction would sound the death knell of downtown. The plan also sharpened existing rivalries between competing Euclid Avenue department stores vying for their share of a declining downtown retail trade. Behind the scenes, the farthest stores from the Terminal, which were among the strongest proponents of the subway, battled merchants nearest the Terminal, who hoped to continue reaping the benefits of the lack of downtown circulation. On another level, the subway issue pitted downtown backers against tax-averse working-class Clevelanders, especially those in ethnic wards and the suburbs that ringed them. For many of the latter, CTS should have front-loaded plans to extend the transit system to the underserved southwestern and northeastern suburbs before building what some called an expensive “hole in the ground.”
The subway fight shows the competing metropolitan visions that marked a project that promised both a service and a signal of faith in downtown’s future in what was then the nation’s seventh largest city.
Photographing an Uptown Downtown: Selling 125th Street with Harlem Postcards Andrew Wasserman, Stony Brook University
To reference 125th Street in Harlem is to call upon several frequently invoked, historically motivated phrases. Moving from the local to the national, 125th Street is “Main Street” in the “City within a City” of “Harlem, USA” at the “Center of Black America.” Each formalizes a linked spatial and conceptual understanding of the roadway in particular and Harlem in general, with 125th Street occupying a place of privilege in popular associations of Harlem as a place. However, this does not mean that either’s material identity or community profile has been stable. Since the early 1980s, Harlem— and particularly the major commercial and transportation corridor formed by 125th Street in Central Harlem, a provisionally bounded downtown district within the uptown Manhattan neighborhood—has witnessed a physical,
62 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 economic, and rhetorical reframing: a transformation often discussed in terms of municipal and national grant programs working alongside public and private real estate partnerships to attract upper middle class residential investors and large multi-national corporations. The resulting regional gentrification and neighborhood branding programs have been set against concerns about the loss of an authentic local culture and an unbalanced representation of the greater geographic area of Harlem. Often missing from previous discussions of this history is how this same local culture has been mobilized not against recent development but rather in support of changing psychological identifications with Harlem.
In this paper, I consider the relationship between 125th Street and Harlem as found in Harlem Postcards, an ongoing collective photographic postcard program commissioned by the Studio Museum in Harlem since 2002. Using the medium of the souvenir postcard as both circulating art exhibition and regional beautification project, Harlem Postcards serves as a visual directory of the community. Unlike the long, linear perspective-structured views of the early twentieth century picture postcard, isolated fragments of 125th Street’s storefront and sidewalk culture are often captured within Harlem Postcards and advanced as representative of the neighborhood. The messy elements of a vernacular object culture that otherwise would have stood in the way of downtown revitalization and revisualization programs a century prior are now elevated as place-defining features of the region. Mundane objects and locales become emblems for disparate yet thriving commercial interests. Through the museum’s distanced yet still traceable interventions in the postcards, a distinctive and productive Harlem economy is set forth, masking the tensions underlying this economy. Although public debates over the regulation of commercial practices along 125th Street have cropped up consistently since the 1920s, it is the more recent history of conflict, competition, intervention, and relocation between and of recently-arrived chain store business owners, long-term resident storefront business owners, licensed sidewalk vendors, and unlicensed sidewalk peddlers along the roadway that is engaged by the photographs. Thus, now similar to the selective editing employed by previous postcard studios, the assembled images of Harlem Postcards advance a highly controlled visual narrative of this urban center, designed to ameliorate perceptions of the uptown downtown district.
Session C10: Immigrants in Cities Chair: David Monteyne, University of Calgary Comment: David Monteyne, University of Calgary
Shared Space and Markets: African American and Jewish Relations in Cleveland from 1900 to 1945 John Baden, Case Western Reserve University
This presentation will examine relations between African Americans and Jewish immigrants in Cleveland, Ohio from 1900 to 1945. It will argue that a history of shared urban space fostered inter-reliance between Jewish entrepreneurs and their black customers. While African American-Jewish interdependence has been explored in the context of civil rights, this presentation will reveal how interactions in Jewish-owned corner-stores, nightclubs, music shops, housing, and even criminal enterprises drove relations between African Americans and
63 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Jews as much as their history as two oppressed peoples. While this paper will focus on Cleveland, similar conditions existed in Northeastern and Midwestern cities throughout the United States. This presentation seeks to alter some of assumptions of African American-Jewish historiography, as well as provide historical context for some of the contemporary inner-city ethnic relations between African Americans and first and second generation immigrants who often operate businesses in their neighborhoods.
This presentation will be based primary research gleaned from Cleveland’s African American newspaper, the Cleveland Call & Post, oral history, GIS reconstructions of businesses in the neighborhoods examined, and genealogical sources to trace the lives and migration patterns of business owners. Most of this research was done for my master’s thesis, which I am now converting to an article I seek to publish in an academic journal.
Refugee Resettlement and Community in Philadelphia, 1975-2012 Domenic Vitiello, University of Pennsylvania
The refugee resettlement system that formalized in the decades since the end of the Vietnam War is perhaps the most concerted and comprehensive approach to newcomer integration in United States cities and towns. Resettlement agencies arrange for housing and help newcomers navigate housing and labor markets, health and school systems, language acquisition, and myriad aspects of everyday life in neighborhoods. The agencies’ partners include mutual aid societies, civil rights lawyers, and community organizing and advocacy organizations that have often challenged the resettlement system and exposed its failings. The history of the resettlement system reflects at the same time the tremendous generosity and resourcefulness of many members of newcomer and receiving communities and their charitable organizations, the diversity of refugees and their challenges in resettlement, and the basic inadequacy and injustices of the resettlement system for both newcomer and receiving communities.
This paper will be a draft of the third chapter of the book I am presently beginning to write, which compares how civil society organizations and community development strategies evolved to address the often distinct issues facing different newcomer groups in Philadelphia since the end of World War II: Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Southeast Asian and Eastern European refugees, Koreans, Africans (especially Liberians), Arabs, and Mexicans.
This paper/chapter on refugees will recount how the resettlement system “grew up” in Philadelphia: as it first formalized in the late 1970s and 80s; reconfigured in the 1980s and 90s in response to welfare reforms and the rise of refugee mutual aid associations; and pursued a variety of household and community-based strategies to support social, economic, and other aspects of integration. It will relate the experiences of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian refugees of the late 70s and early 80s, focusing on housing, work, and relationships between newcomer and receiving communities – all of which inspired a variety of activism, secondary migration, and social service and community development responses in these and subsequent decades. Finally, the paper/chapter will compare these refugees’ experiences, and the institutional and neighborhood contexts of resettlement they encountered, to those of later Eastern European, African, and Asian refugees to the city and region. This comparison aims to
64 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 illuminate how the diversity of newcomer and receiving communities, together with key changes and continuities in the resettlement system and refugee civil society, have shaped diverse and divergent experiences for different people and places.
Graduate Student Writing Workshop Chair: Matt Lasner, Hunter College
SATURDAY OCTOBER 5, 2013 SESSIONS D - G
PAPER SESSION D
Session D1: The Science of Art and Planning Chair: Ellen Shoshkes, Portland State University Comment: TBD
The Search for Order: Harland Bartholomew and the Comprehensive Plan Mark Abbott, Harris-Stowe State University
The paper which I am proposing is an examination of Harland Bartholomew’s construct of the comprehensive plan and the urban vision which it represents.
Bartholomew is perhaps the most under-studied major urban planner of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned way over a fifty years, Bartholomew was instrumental in the evolution of zoning, the advent of urban renewal, and the making of the interstate highway system. While many urban commentators now discount Bartholomew because they see his ideas as either being passé or wrong-headed (and by some, even demonical), it could be argued that no one person had as much impact on mid-twentieth urban America as Harland Bartholomew.
The one area which I believe that Bartholomew is the most under-recognized for his contributions is his construct or model for the comprehensive plan. Although he was only a teenager when the first comprehensive plans for St. Louis (1907) and Chicago (1909) were prepared, the “template” which he concocted for the comprehensive plan, first as a planner in Newark and St. Louis and then as a consultant, has shaped comprehensive planning in the United States—and throughout the world—for nearly a century.
Even though urban planning scholars today spend relatively little time thinking about Bartholomew—at least in a positive vein—he had an amazing career. He was the head of the City of St. Louis planning agency for almost forty years and was a member of the University of Illinois planning department for almost as long. In both capacities, he had an international reputation. But where he was truly a giant in the field was as head of—at the time—the largest urban planning consulting firm in the world. While this St. Louis-based firm did
65 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 planning work of all kinds, what Harland Bartholomew and Associates (HBA) was noted for was the comprehensive plan. During its existence, HBA produced over six hundred comprehensive plans around the world. Because of the just the sheer number of HBA plans, they became the standard by which all other plans were measured both then and now.
Norman Johnson did an excellent job in his doctoral study of Bartholomew and later in an article for the Journal of the American Institute of Planners (1973) explicating the elements of Bartholomew’s “recipe” for the comprehensive plan. As Johnson correctly observes, Bartholomew and his firm saw comprehensive planning as a science and that the HBA plan always had the same six physical elements— streets, transit, transportation (rail and water), public recreation, zoning, and civic art.
But what interests me about Bartholomew’s comprehensive planning construct is not so much the construct itself but how the construct reflects Bartholomew’s notion of the city which the plan is intended to shape. Indeed I see Bartholomew as an under-utilized window into the mind of the mid-century urban planner.
From Organism to Artifact: The Development of Louis Wirth’s Sociological Planning Scott Colman, Rice School of Architecture
In 1954 the architect Ernest Grunsfeld published a Plan for Metropolitan Chicago. Developed in conjunction with the prominent mid-century American sociologist Louis Wirth, before Wirth’s death in 1952, the Grunsfeld-Wirth plan proposed a neighbourhood-unit-based scheme in the context of the ongoing development of Chicago’s metropolitan- and regional-scaled infrastructure. Coming at the very end of Wirth’s long and distinguished career, the plan was the culmination of a decades-long transformation in Wirth’s sociological thought, his conception of planning, and his understanding of the city.
Central to the planning debate in the United States at mid-century, having, among other things, penned the National Resources Planning Board report Our Cities in 1937, Wirth was a crucial figure in Illinois planning and the postwar reformation of Chicago’s South Side. As a student at the University of Chicago, Wirth was thoroughly grounded in the Chicago School of Sociology, which, as the dominant strain of American sociology during the interwar period, significantly contributed to the theoretical underpinnings of mid-century American planning. As the most prominent representative of the Chicago School at mid-century, Wirth inherited both the pragmatist origins of that school and its preoccupation with the city. Yet, unlike his mentor Robert Park, the leading member of the Chicago School during the interwar period, Wirth took an activist position with respect to the city and its formation.
Through a close reading of Wirth’s writings, in the context of his developing advocacy for planning, this paper will assert that Wirth progressively called into question the tenets of interwar American sociology and, in so doing, fundamentally transformed his sociological theory toward a position that was consistent with his planning activities. Centred on the interrelationship between the social organism and the physical artifact, Wirth’s ongoing considerations of the city shifted in emphasis from social factors as the determining force of urban form to the need for physical forms that preserved the social life of the metropolis. Faced with racial strife, the irrational effects
66 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 of wartime propaganda, the hollowing out of the urban core, apparent demographic decline, and the threat of postwar economic stagnation, Wirth defended heterogeneity as the ideal quality of the city. For social scientists like Wirth and his close associate, the political scientist Charles Merriam, the metropolis was the locus of democracy and progressive social vision. In his planning activism, Wirth worked with government, community, and business leaders to shore up the declining city. Wirth sought to reengineer the centralised metropolis as the locus of free expression by providing the efficient artifact through which the mutually beneficial interactions of the heterogeneous social organism would occur.
Therefore, in taking up the neighbourhood unit at a moment in which it was coming under attack, by planners such as Reginald Isaacs and others, Wirth and Grunsfeld were basing their planning on a highly developed sociological theory that was fundamentally distinct from the sociological thought active in the neighbourhood unit’s early adoption. While the components of the model Grunsfeld and Wirth employed were consistent with neighbourhood units proposed since Clarence Perry, the paper will assert that both its context and intention were different, suggesting the need for a more nuanced understanding of the history of the neighborhood unit both as a concept and in its application.
The City, Landscape and Constitutional Plans of the 6th Earl of Mar (1675-1732) Margaret Stewart, University of Edinburgh
Lord Mar’s was a leading statesman and architect of the political union of Scotland and England in 1707. He later led the Jacobite Rising of 1715 for the restoration of the exiled Stuart monarchy. Following the collapse of the Rising Mar remained in exile in Europe until his death. His surviving papers and drawn plans disclose his expertise as a an architect, and landscape designer as well as his belief that economic and industrial developments were the preconditions for the restoration of Scotland’s political autonomy following the Act of Union of 1707. Mar was a leading exponent of the Scottish Historical Landscape – a formal style which evolved in Scotland in the final decade of the 17th century, and which achieved its greatest realisation in Mar’s design for his own estate at Alloa in Clackmannanshire, c. 1715. Mar drew on the ideas of French infrastructure planning as had been practised by Louis XIV and Colbert. Mar’s schemes incorporated industrial developments such as the Gartmorn System, a hydraulic engineering scheme devised for Mar by the engineer George Sorocold, a new road network, new residential district, harbour improvements, etc: the impact of this scheme on the industrial development of Clackmannanshire was enormous.
In exile after 1716 Mar produced urban schemes for Paris, London and Edinburgh. These were Baroque in form with long radial avenues but as with his Alloa plan his idea was more than just aesthetic improvement--he suggested radical alterations to existing road networks, zoning of districts to segregate dwelling from industry, new bridges and the re-siting of major public buildings. The plans were linked to his idea of a political reconfiguration of the UK and France--the aim being to dissolve the incorporating union of Scotland and England and replace it with a federal of Scotland, England, Ireland and France which would reduce the risk of future conflict between the UK and France. The three great cities were to reflect the common aims of the federation through common aspects of their visual design. Mar’s federalism was based on the ideas of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun – the same source which influenced the federal system
67 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 adopted for the United States constitution later in the 18th century.
The diversity and genius of Mar’s plans was only partially recognised in his lifetime by a number of close friends including the architect James Gibbs and the satirist Jonathan Swift. Although exile removed him from effective engagement in public life in the UK some of his ideas, nevertheless, were executed: the design of New Town for Edinburgh after 1760, the Waterloo Bridge in London and the construction of the Forth-Clyde canal in Scotland. Mar was one of the most visionary and precocious planners in history; his capacity for integrated thinking , skilful management of complex natural and man-made resources, economics, and sensitivity to historical sites and natural landscape are factors we still struggle to incorporate in modern life.
Canadian Planning History in a Transnational Context: The Vancouver Town Planning Commission’s Search for a City Planner, 1926 Catherine Mary Ulmer, McGill University
In May, 1926 the Vancouver Town Planning Commission sent a letter to several city planners inviting them to apply for the position of city planning advisor. That August, it announced the appointment of the American planner Harland Bartholomew. The Commission’s choice of Bartholomew seemed one based on his credentials as by 1926, Bartholomew had overseen comprehensive plans of seven American cities. However, a deeper consideration of his selection suggests Bartholomew was chosen based as much on the American- - style planning tradition he represented as he was due to his professional resume. From its beginnings, Canada’s modern planning movement was shaped by British and American planning practice and theory. While British influence first dominated Canada’s movement, by the 1920s, American planning ideas were increasingly popular. Historian Stephen V. Ward designates the Vancouver Commission’s choice of Bartholomew, over British and Canadian candidates, the event that “underlined” this turning point in Canadian planning history (“British and American Influences on Canadian Planning: The Example of Vancouver 1910-- 1975.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 13.1 (1998): 127). Yet, while Bartholomew’s 1928 plan of Vancouver has been the focus of scholarship, and even warrants a commemorative website by the Vancouver City Archives, the process leading to his selection has garnered less attention. Given its significance to the study of both Canadian and international planning history, this is a surprising omission.
My paper uses the Commission’s process of selecting its planning advisor as a case study through which to view the intersection of British, American, and Canadian influence over Canada’s planning movement. My paper expands on Ward’s assertion that this moment characterized a crossroads in the evolution of planning in Canada. Bartholomew’s appointment underscores Canada’s active participation in the international planning movement and illustrates the transnational planning dialogue that existed between these three nations at that time. In selecting an American, Vancouver’s Commission turned away from both British and Canadian planners. By 1926, Canadian planners had established themselves as recognized professionals and the Commission was under pressure to choose a Canadian to oversee work in Vancouver. Yet, in composing its shortlist, the Commission considered nine Americans as compared to two Canadians and one British planner. The Commission may have felt that, despite the growing popularity of American planning ideas, the Canadian movement was still too
68 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 closely tied to its British roots. However, its rejection of Canada’s planners called their competency into question and was quickly disputed. Despite these protests, the Commission’s choices exemplify the larger trend in Canadian planning at that moment: a purposeful change in the direction of transnational planning discourse.
By examining the Vancouver Town Planning Commission’s search for a planning advisor as a moment through which to study Canadian planning history in a transnational context, larger historical processes are illustrated. This event highlights the effects of transnational networks between planning movements, and the progression of planning in Canada. A fuller consideration of it enriches the existing historiography of both Canadian and transnational planning history.
Session D2: Pax Americana: Landscapes of the American Pursuit of Peace Chair: Shiben Banerji, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Comment: Marta Gutman, The City College of New York
Talks Not Troops: Negotiating a Place for Peace in New York City Nandini Bagchee, The City College of New York
A photograph from 1991, taken during the first gulf war, shows a three story office building in the Lower East Side. A large white banner strung across the top of the brick parapet reads, "Talks Not Troops!" The derelict appearance of the building in the photograph and the pithy slogan are a timely reminder that spaces of dissent do exist within the city. If there is an infrastructure of peace and social justice within New York City, this place, nick-named the “Peace Pentagon” would be its unofficial headquarters.
The building, located at the intersection of Lafayette and Bleecker streets, was acquired by the War Resisters League in the early 1970's. It has since provided subsidized office space for a diverse group of tenants working on issues ranging from war resistance to healthcare and housing. In 2008, a structural report revealed that the sagging lintels were the outward signs of serious structural problems. Over the years, weather, the subway tunnel below, and careless maintenance had all taken their toll on the structure. The building was in need of repairs and the estimated expense of this undertaking came as a complete shock to the bare-bones pacifist community. In a neighborhood increasingly defined by profit driven development, the activists found themselves negotiating in the unfamiliar terrain of construction, fund raising and real estate maneuvering.
Having long admired the resilience of this community of social justice advocates, I took their predicament to be a provocation through which artists, architects, engineers and other designers could examine the question of public space in a completely different way. To this end, I coordinated an architectural competition that was a call to action.
In this paper, I present the outcome of this undertaking, not in terms of the particular merits of the design proposals we received, but rather as a body of work that deployed the tactics of the activists and itself became a form of activism. I will explore the idea behind the “Peace
69 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Pentagon” as that part of the public sphere where planning and logistics are prioritized and the limits of democracy are tested. While there are many monuments that attempt to symbolize peace, I would like to bring to the fore an institution that is invested in becoming an instrument for the pursuit of peace.
Americans Abroad: Aramco’s Ras Tanura Compound circa 1970 June Williamson, The City College of New York This paper comprises a pre-1973 microhistory, told through oral histories, primary source documents and photographs, and historical maps, of Aramco—the Arab American Oil Company—and its planned residential compounds on the Persian Gulf for expatriate employees, mostly but not exclusively Americans, and their families. This was a period of symbiotic development of the petrochemical industry; it could be viewed as a period of construction of Western/Muslim “infrastructures of peace.” In many ways, the planning for Aramco facilities echoed military encampments, and in other ways differed markedly.
Oil was discovered in Damman, near Dhahran, in 1938. In early 1944, as World War II was entering its final years, Aramco was formed as a joint venture of Standard Oil of California and Texaco, which had been granted the concession by the Saudi royal family. The Najmah residential compound adjacent to the Ras Tanura refinery, gated and walled, was planned as a beachfront neighborhood unit, for overseas “Aramcons” to enjoy the comforts of home: a modern elementary school, a country club with swimming pool, a tennis club, a golf course, a community theater, library, and playgrounds. Some residential units were ranch-style houses on culs-de-sac with crabgrass lawns; others were garden apartments. Families could shop at the Aramco commissary, modeled after facilities at U.S. military bases, or take their chances at Al-Khobar, a nearby market town. It was like home, maybe better, but with a few twists. A natural gas flare burned day and night, partially polluting a night sky that was otherwise ablaze with stars. At Christmastime, Santa arrived on a camel. Weekend house parties were fueled with “sidiqi” distilled in the kitchen sink. The neighborhood, after all, was full of experienced petroleum engineers.
A little bit of 1950s North American suburbia had been displaced partway around the world (and even by the early 1970s, Aramco remained in the cultural realm of that previous decade). The compound’s walls kept the Saudis, and guest laborers from other Muslim countries out, and the Aramcons in. Both groups had ample motivation to keep the peace, for security and profit, while there was abundant crude oil and natural gas to extract, and before regional geopolitics forced the complete transfer of company ownership to the Saudis in 1980.
How might the mutually beneficial Pax Americana regime of the mid-east petrochemical industry shaped the subsequent wealth-fueled rapid modernization and development of the cities of the Persian Gulf coast? What traces in the built landscape can be found to attest to this process? How might daily life in the Aramco planned residential compounds, like Najmah, have played a role?
Playing for Peace: The World Fellowship Center Before Marion Mahony Shiben Banerji, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
70 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
There has long been in a literature on recreation as the ‘moral equivalent of war’. In fact, this literature is as old as the organized movement to create playgrounds and outdoor recreation within American cities and their environs. Early 20th century advocates of the Boy Scouts movement, urban playgrounds, and physical education often claimed that regimented sports satisfied the human appetite for war. Lurking in this assertion was the thought that male soldiers were ideal citizens, willing to sacrifice themselves for the nation and always prepared to subjugate their individual freedom for a collective purpose. Organized sports and recreation, its proponents argued, honed the ideals of civic participation and sacrifice associated with militarism while curbing the blood-lust associated with war.
This paper follows the career of one such advocate: Charles Frederick Weller. A founding member of the National Recreation Association, Weller was a prominent advocate for open spaces within cities during the Progressive Era and a firm believer in the ability of the Boy Scouts to instill a sense of discipline and preparedness for war in young men. In 1941, immediately after the United States joined the Second World War, Weller became an ardent advocate for peace, creating a 300 acre retreat for newly conscripted GIs in rural New Hampshire. Called the World Fellowship Center, Weller would once again turn to recreation as a technique for controlling the lust for blood. Although he never encouraged GIs to abandon their duty, he hoped that his retreat would prepare soldiers for a permanent, post-war peace, in which they would not be regarded as conquering heroes or as model national citizens but instead be viewed as members of a world community.
Drawing on Weller’s early research on open space, his private correspondence as well as the daily activity reports of the World Fellowship Center, this paper traces the emergence of ‘play’ as the template for a global peace secured by the United States. It is against this background that this paper analyzes the American architect and planner Marion Mahony’s 1942 proposal to build a dense agglomeration of urban amusements and leisure spaces for the World Fellowship Center.
Session D3: Citizen Participation and Federal Policy in the 1960s and 70s Chair: Roger Biles, Illinois State University Comment: Sarah Jo Peterson, Urban Land Institute
The Model Cities Program in the Southwest: Planning in an Era of Cultural Individualism Robert B. Fairbanks, University of Texas at Arlington
On January 8, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson in his State of the Union Address, declared “unconditional war on poverty.” This edict differed fundamentally from the declaration in the 1930s of a war on slums, the enactment by Congress, under the prodding of housing reformers, of the Housing Act of 1937. The new emphasis by Johnson on the poor contrasted sharply with the earlier emphasis on slums and their threat to the larger city. The anti-slum warriors aimed at protecting the city from the evil influence of cancerous slums and making better citizens out of slum dwellers, by eradicating slums and replacing them with large-scale community and cultural development housing projects.
71 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
By the 1960s, however, federal policy acknowledged that policies which exclusively emphasized physical, social, and civic settings for helping the poor no longer made sense, and in response laid much emphasis on addressing the economic, social and educational needs on the poor in their own neighborhoods so that the poverty stricken could take care of themselves and their neighborhoods. Such efforts of organizing the poor and giving them influence over their neighborhoods would go a long way in attacking the culture of poverty, according to this view. As a result, President Lyndon Johnson promoted anti-poverty programs, not anti-slum programs, in the war on poverty that emphasized the totality of human needs, including the desire of humans to live in and help design their neighborhood of choice. Indeed, a report from HUD about this time reflected the new sentiment when it concluded that programs for the poor now “needed the maximum feasible participation of those who would be affected by them.”
My paper proposes to explore the Model Cities programs in the Southwest looking at why cities such as Houston, San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Phoenix responded to the opportunities offered by the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 and how this differed significantly from the earlier war on slums in the Southwest. It will argue that a new emphasis on what Professor Zane L. Miller has characterized as cultural individualism helps explain the popularity of this new program. The paper will also explore why some Southwestern cities that had hesitated from participating in urban renewal programs embraced the Model Cities program. Finally, it will explore the changing nature of planning as it relates to the Model Cities program and the consequences of the new emphasis for these Southwestern cities.
“We Need Altered Ways of Life and Altered Lives”: The Model Cities Program and Citizen Participation Maki Smith, University of California at San Diego
This paper explores the federal Model Cities Program (MCP) and its rhetorical deployment of “citizen participation” as a novel form of urban governance to alleviate poverty. Under the auspices of the MCP the federal government—in concert with local municipal officials—moved to incorporate previously marginalized urban communities into the sphere of urban beautification and rehabilitation. These efforts represented a stark departure from previous urban renewal efforts that residents of America’s cities had branded as “neighborhood destruction” and “Negro Removal.” The War on Poverty represents a transformational moment in American history as it pertained to the federal government’s relationship to cities and their residents. For the first time, there emerged a federal mandate to nurture and utilize “community” in the implementation of urban planning and implementation. I argue that the MCP and its focus on citizen participation, while ostensibly empowering and liberating, represented a pivotal governing strategy that served as a regulatory project for the liberal state.
The federal government’s interventions into nurturing “community” and “citizen participation” offers scholars exciting opportunities for research. On the one hand, the MCP and other War on Poverty initiatives may be read as opportunities for social action on the part of the urban poor and racialized minorities. However, I want to offer a more nuanced view. Through the research and planning stages, President Lyndon Johnson and the academics and bureaucrats who made up his urban poverty task force, argued for the need to funnel the anger and energies
72 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 of the urban poor into the “productive” aspects of neighborhood beautification and improvement. I read the multiple research papers and memorandums submitted to President Johnson to explore how federal and local officials endeavored to govern previously “problem” populations through discourses of inclusion and participation.
Divisive Visions: Ethnic and Class Conflict on the Lower East Side in the Age of Urban Renewal Rebecca Amato, Graduate Center, City University of New York
While the Lower East Side of Manhattan had for decades been a site of contention for planners and reformers--labeled as both the quintessential slum and a mosaic of “foreign districts” at the turn of the twentieth century, slated for demolition and reclamation as a residential area for Wall Streeters in the 1920s, eventually crowded with the declining dreams of public housing in the 1940s and ‘50s--it is during the age of urban renewal that internal battles among residents over the meaning and future of the Lower East Side grew most heated. Perhaps ironically, federal requirements for citizen participation in the Housing Act of 1954 and local, citywide efforts to invite citizen input in municipal decision-making exacerbated conflicts that were already brewing over the spaces of the Lower East Side.
In this paper, I examine the activities of two groups--the Lower East Side Neighborhoods Association (LENA), which grew out of Henry Street Settlement, and Mobilization for Youth (MFY), a federally-funded, anti-poverty demonstration project--as they attempted to cultivate the participation of residents in planning for the area. Each group represented a different constituency of residents and, as a result, each promoted a distinctive vision for a renewed neighborhood. LENA and its local supporters, on one hand, hoped for a “balanced neighborhood,” one that would be fully integrated along class and ethnic lines. MFY and its clients, on the other hand, saw the Lower East Side as a long-time haven for the working poor regardless of ethnicity, and they worked to preserve it as such.
In the end, neither group would survive long enough to influence either the outcome of urban renewal plans or the physical and social planning of the area in the decades after. However, smaller, indigenous political organizations would splinter from both LENA and MFY and remain active in local contests over space and redevelopment. While the encouragement of citizen participation during urban renewal was hardly intended to enhance conflict, the result, at least on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was to increase democratic involvement in planning far beyond the urban renewal era.
Session D4: Demolition and Renewal Chair: Todd Michney, The University of Toledo Comment: Daniel Kerr, American University
“Demolition by Neglect”: Right-Sizing Baltimore 1968-1980 Emily Lieb, Seattle University
The book I am writing, Breaking Baltimore: How Public Policy Destroyed a Great
73 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
American City, tells the story of the unspooling crisis of urbanism in one city from the Progressive Era until the end of the 1970s. It is a biography of four generations of bad policymaking in Baltimore that “zooms out” to show how government decisions progressively destroyed American cities and “zooms in” to show how those decisions affected the people who lived in one African-American neighborhood in West Baltimore. I hope to present a part of this larger project, a paper on the politics and planning of urban shrinkage in the 1970s, at the SACRPH conference this fall.
During the 1970s, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and festival marketplaces like it became some of the most iconic American urban places. They played an important discursive role in what Newsweek called “the big comeback from the urban crisis of the 1960s”; they also, as many scholars have argued, served as a distraction from the fact that this “big comeback” was mostly illusory.
Powerful Baltimoreans’ enthusiasm for the Inner Harbor and the escapism it represented is also linked to the difficult questions about the allocation of scarce urban resources that many cash-strapped cities were forced to face as the Great Society faded into the 1970s— questions that will shape my talk (and that have enormous contemporary resonance). How do you shrink a city? Who decides what stays and what goes? What sacrifices are necessary to make cities sustainable, and what defines a successful city? What—and who—are cities for?
In my paper, I will tell the story of how so-called triage planning (also known as “planned shrinkage”) unfolded in Baltimore, where officials struggled to maintain urban infrastructure in the face of shrinking population and tax revenue. Their scattershot cutbacks to services like schools and sanitation hastened the decline of the city’s neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the glitter of the Inner Harbor obscured the fact that by the end of the decade, the Baltimore that surrounded it was almost unrecognizably small.
More than Blight: The Role of Place in Urban Renewal Sara Patenaude, Georgia State University
Space, especially public space, makes possible the formation of a specific identity, whether for a particular culture, community, or person. Physical spaces, when combined with the abstract intellectual, political, and community spaces, are what give growth to ideas of personhood and expression of identity, characterized by connection to “place.” With space serving such an important role in the creation of identity, restriction of access to space has been a way of limiting the expression of rights and group identity.
The making of place has received increasing attention in recent years, from Dolores Hayden’s place-making to W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s idea of “memoryscapes.” The sense of place is characterized as memory embodied in space, and necessitates lived experience. As one of the more elusive, yet still necessary, aspects of life, place can provide insight into the larger geography of race and class. This paper argues that viewing urban renewal efforts in light of place complicates the narrative of renewal as uplift.
The determination of blight in inner-city Baltimore represented middle-class ideals rather
74 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 than working-class realities. Blighted neighborhoods were eye-sores, stains upon the reputation of the city. Urban reformers viewed blighted areas as a problem which spawned many others – poor education, poor health, and poor work ethic included. By solving the problem of sub- standard housing, reformers sought to have positive effects on the others. Their solution was public housing in conjunction with slum clearance, touted as urban renewal.
In viewing the slums as a problem, reformers were blind to the slums as a community. Because the blighted neighborhoods did not conform to middle-class ideals, the sense of place was ignored and the community bonds erased. I argue that, contrary to the assertions by reformers, there was a sense of place in blighted neighborhoods, and the slums were a locus of cohesion and identity for many of those who called them home. Further, the condemnation of blighted neighborhoods was additionally a condemnation of those who called them home.
When removed from slums and put into projects, residents had to create a new sense of place. Place is not directly transferable; it cannot be plucked from one space and superimposed onto another. Rather, those who lived in public housing formed new place identity within their new spaces. Once again, place-identity did not conform to middle- class ideals; this place- identity can be seen through gang affiliation as much as tenant advocacy groups. We must take both in account when examining place, especially in formerly displaced communities.
Session D5: Transnational Urbanism and Second-Tier Planners from the 1940s-1960s Chair: Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College Comment: Audience
Hans Blumenfeld (1892-1988): Architect, Planner, Consultant and Pacifist: Thinking Global and Working Local As Well As Vice Versa Dirk Schubert, HafenCity University
Hans Blumenfeld was a German architect and planner grown up in Hamburg, related to the famous, rich, Jewish merchant family Warburg. He studied architecture in Karlsruhe, Munich and Darmstadt. He travelled to the USA from 1924-1927 and worked afterwards in Hamburg in architectural offices like H. + O. Gerson and K. Schneider. After 1930 he started working in the Soviet Union until 1937, before he went to France and then in 1938 he emigrated to the USA. He worked in Philadelphia (with Ed Bacon), in New York (with Norman Bel Geddes) in Toronto (with M. V. Jones). He also worked as a consultant for example as a “Visiting Expert” for the US-Government for the reconstruction in Germany. From 1961-1988 he became Professor for planning at the University of Toronto and was also working as a consultant for the UN and the OECD as well.
His broad experience and knowledge was always combined with critical views to the planning business. He didn’t like the daily routines and became a kind of a maverick. But his opinions were often used to change or to improve existing plans. As a pacifist and being sympathic with some ideas of communism he got many troubles with his citizenship his occupational status was often problematic. He was stateless for many years before he became Canadian citizen. He published many articles (many of them republished in P. D. Spreiregen
75 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
(ed.) 1967, The Modern Metropolis) on divers topics related to cities in general and to urban planning as well as last not least a biography reflecting his life and work on three continents. His academic life started in the age of 70 years. He was familiar with many celebrities inside and outside the world of urban planners like Werner Hebebrand, Adolf Loos, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Ed Bacon, Norman Bel Geddes, Percy Johnson-Marshall, Jaqueline Thyrrwitt, Marshall Mc Luhan and Gordon Stephenson. He preferred to be flexible, he loved travelling and with this global background and knowledge he called himself a “drifter” and titled his biography: “Life begins at 65”.
After a short biographical survey, I’ll focus in this contribution on his vocational and academic networks and his planning philosophy. This was embedded in a pacifistic and socialistic-democratic world outlook, a human perspective for scale and structure of cities and responsibilities of urban planners for creating livable cities. This will be elaborated in detail with reference to some of his articles (especially on neighbourhood planning and urban renewal) as well as some plans (in Philadelphia and Toronto) he was involved with.
MoMA and the Translation of European-Style Community Development to the US Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College
In the 1950s and 60s, politicians and design professionals on both sides of the Atlantic conceived of urban modernization as essential to create cities adapted to the automobile- age and the economic needs of modern society, cities that could provide healthy and functional living spaces to all people. Short and long-term travel of planners, shared pre- war theories and their international circulation as well as a common reliance on planning during the war period have contributed to a certain similarity of urban development, the planning processes and the resulting urban practices and the actor constellations were very different. Whereas planners in Germany and other war-destroyed countries had ample opportunity for rebuilding as well as long- established public planning traditions, planners in the United States intervened in cities that were largely intact and where private forces had generally trumped public interests.
To achieve a closer understanding of similarities and dissimilarities in the post-war transformation of cities on both sides of the Atlantic, of professional networks and the circulation of practices and knowledge, this paper examines the work of Oscar Stonorov, a German immigrant and second-tier planner who had co-edited a publication on Le Corbusier’s work in the 1930s and who collaborated with Edmund Bacon on the transformation of Philadelphia in the post war period. This paper particularly examines the role of Stonorov and his co-author Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn in promoting planning as a community enterprise. In the 1940s Stonorov and Kahn published brochures such as “You and Your Neighborhood, A Primer” that gave detailed information to the American public on how to design a neighborhood. Their ideas found support by the Museum of Modern Art in New York who promoted this brochure in 1944 in conjunction with its exhibit “Look at your Neighborhood” prepared by the Swiss architect Rudolph Mock and the American architect Clarence Stein. The paper examines Stonorov to exemplify the importance of second-tier European immigrants as translators of European public urban planning concepts into private community-building American practice.
76 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Gordon Stephenson and Canadian Downtown Planning David L.A. Gordon, Queen’s University
Gordon Stephenson (1908-97) was responsible for the international diffusion of Modern planning ideas from his UK birthplace to North America and Australasia. He was educated at the University of Liverpool, MIT and within Le Corbusier’s studio. Stephenson prepared the UK Government’s guidelines for downtown redevelopment, prior to planning Stevenage new town and designing its central business district in collaboration with Clarence Stein.
From 1955 to 1960, Stephenson lived in Canada, appointed as Foundation Professor for the graduate program in urban planning at the University of Toronto. During the summers, he conducted urban renewal studies for Halifax (1957), Kingston (1958-60) and London (1960). He also advised the City of Ottawa on its urban renewal program from 1958-68. Gordon Stephenson prepared some of Canada’s earliest downtown plans with local collaborators, as part of these urban renewal schemes. He also served on the jury for the 1957 international architectural competition Toronto City Hall.
The paper will draw upon interviews with Stephenson’s local collaborators and primary sources in Kingston, London ON, Ottawa and Toronto. It will compare the downtown planning approaches in these studies and place them in context with other urban renewal studies of the late 1950s, demonstrating that Stephenson was a trans-Atlantic conduit for Modern planning ideas.
Session D6: Occupying Main Street Chair: Max Page, University of Massachusetts Amherst Comment: Max Page, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Occupying Main Street in the Jim Crow South Kirin Makker, Hobart William Smith Colleges
In the 1880s, a black Texas legislator named Robert Lloyd Smith learned about educational pioneer B.G. Northrop’s successful civic work in small towns across the Northeast, Midwest and West. Inspired, Smith started the first known African American village improvement society in the country in the small all-black community of Oakland, or “Freedmanstown”, Texas. Although the group started with traditional beautification projects such as planting trees and installing sidewalks, within ten years the association reframed its mission squarely on combating poverty among rural blacks regionally. Renamed the Farmers’ Home Improvement Society (FHIS), the group claimed 21,000 members spread over Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas by 1909. At the height of Jim Crow, the organization successfully fought share-cropping, built schools, developed credit systems to help families own homes and farms, offered medical aid, and improved farming.
Northrop’s village improvement movement, as a grassroots project responsible for generating a collective identity for America’s small town Main Streets, is an early example of bottom-up incremental planning. However, Smith and the leaders of the FHIS found that
77 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 finely- grained municipal projects in segregated village centers were not enough to generate progress and civic engagement among disenfranchised rural blacks. The FHIS’s activity reveals how Main Street as a space of the American dream has long been a workable concept, pliable in the hands of people who must “occupy” it. Main Street was re-defined by black families so that it was institutionally and geographically expansive; it could only be the progressive core of a community if it offered education, financial assistance, and healthcare beyond town boundaries. This essay theorizes the work of the FHIS within the context of the larger village improvement movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Main Street has long been a complex site of strategic and tactical innovation, reform, and renewal through local and regional political agency and occupation.
Degnan Boulevard and the Origin of a Hub of Black Expression in Modern Los Angeles Jennifer Mandel, Hesser College
Following Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and Barrows v. Jackson (1953), the United States Supreme Court landmark rulings that declared racial restrictive covenants unenforceable, African Americans in Los Angeles, California seized the opportunity to migrate into the desirable Westside. The community of Leimert Park served as the entry point of black settlement into the affluent Crenshaw district. Built in the 1920s, Leimert Park boasted quality single-family houses, reputable public schools, and a quaint business district, or what became known as Leimert Park Village, on Degnan Boulevard that gave its middle- class residents a small-town feel in a large city. For the first two decades after its development, Leimert Park remained covered by restrictive covenants that forbade people of color from living in the area. But in the postwar years, middle-class blacks purchased homes on the residential blocks, opened businesses in the business district, and claimed the area as their own. Through the postwar years, the population of Leimert Park underwent a dramatic shift. As the black population rose from 0.4 percent in 1950 to 30 percent in 1960 to 69.2 percent in 1970, the white population fell from 99.5 percent in 1950 to 51.8 percent in 1960 to 12.9 percent in 1970. Among the black newcomers, Los Angeles police officer and future mayor Tom Bradley, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, and musician Ray Charles brought prestige to the area. But racism and ignorance drove whites away on the residential blocks as well as the business district.
In the mid-1960s, twenty-four-year-old, high school art teacher, Alonzo Joseph Davis, Jr., and his brother, twenty-year-old, college student, Dale Brockman Davis, saw the potential of opening a black-run art gallery in Leimert Park Village. As residents since the early 1960s, Alonzo and Dale sensed that the affluent black newcomers in Leimert Park and the Crenshaw district would make the ideal clients. The Davis brothers rented a storefront on Degnan Boulevard, spruced up the interior, recruited artists, and decided on a name that paid tribute to their familial heritage and gave power to the black past. Brockman Gallery assumed the surname of the Davis brothers’ maternal grandmother, Della Brockman, or what Alonzo explained as the family’s “first slave name.”
From its opening in 1967, Brockman Gallery became a meeting place where black artists not only sold their work, but also planned programs and events. In the spirit of inclusiveness, the Davis brothers showed works of African American, Hispanic, and Japanese
78 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
American artists. From 1973, after securing state and federal grants, the Davis brothers established Brockman Gallery Productions (BGP), a nonprofit division of the gallery. BGP organized and sponsored a myriad of programs, from street fairs and music performances to film festivals and mural projects. By the late 1970s, artists set up their studios in the storefronts adjacent to Brockman Gallery and transformed the business district into a hub of black expression. Brockman Gallery emerged within a broad-based, nationwide movement of the black arts. But, on the local level, Brockman Gallery and BGP used their artwork and activism to pay homage to their African ancestry, spotlight the African American past, celebrate black culture and self-determinism, and claim their right to Leimert Park, Leimert Park Village, and the Crenshaw district.
The Pilgrimization of Plymouth: Creating a Landscape of Memory in Plymouth, Massachusetts during the Pilgrim Tercentenary of 1920-21 Anne C. Reilly, University of Delaware
The small town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, received national attention during the 300th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims in 1920-21. For the commemorators, the town’s size and location were irrelevant factors when compared to its significance as America’s putative birthplace. The Pilgrims landed in Plymouth; therefore, modern pilgrims should return to Plymouth to rediscover the foundation of the American nation. Yet no one could deny that Plymouth was not equipped to host a celebration of national importance. The mythic Rock was still there, to be sure, but there were few other reminders of the town’s founders. Just as Americans needed to embrace Pilgrim values, the landscape of Plymouth itself had to be Pilgrimized. A redesigned waterfront would be an outward manifestation of the Pilgrim Spirit. Once created, this landscape of memory would serve as a sacred place and instill Pilgrim values and virtues in twentieth-century Americans.
The driving force behind this redevelopment did not come from Plymouth but rather from the federal and state commissions created to orchestrate the commemoration of the tercentenary. The federal government appropriated $300,000 for resetting Plymouth Rock, improving the shore, and preserving the early burying grounds on Cole’s Hill and Burial Hill, while the state of Massachusetts secured a similar amount for the celebration. The infusion of so much outside money took aesthetic control out of local hands. Just as Bostonians dominated Massachusetts politics, they wielded great influence over the commemoration. The interests of these out-of-town boosters of the Pilgrim heritage often diverged from those of the in-town businessmen and residents. By focusing on how to best make Plymouth a shrine to the Pilgrims, the official commemorators overlooked the day-to-day needs of a living community. They assumed that Plymoutheans would jump at the opportunity to destroy what had, until recently, been the economic heart of their town. This paper investigates the quiet struggle over power that took place behind the scenes during the creation of this landscape of memory.
Session D7: Multicultural Landscapes and Planning in Toronto Since 1970 Chair: Paul Hess, University of Toronto Comment: Joe Nasr, Ryerson University
79 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Immigrant Suburbanization and Planning Challenges Lucio Lo, York University
Toronto Chinatowns in Transition: Changing Ethnic Retail Landscapes and Implications for Urban Planning Zhixi Cecilia Zhuang, Ryerson University
Historically, Chinatown is a complex construct that combines social, political, economic, cultural and even racial forces. The traditional inner-city precinct is layered with multiple meanings across different periods of time, from an isolated ghetto in its early years, a slum in the peak of urban renewal, to a tourist spot and a well recognized ethnic residential and commercial neighbourhood, and a symbol of the recent age of multiculturalism. Today, suburban Chinatown is on its rise as a result of the suburbanization of immigrant settlement. The changing ethnic retail landscapes present challenges and opportunities to municipalities and call for holistic planning solutions to improve the status quo of the “new” and the “old” Chinatowns.
This paper compares the suburban Chinatown in the City of Markham and the East Chinatown in the inner city of Toronto, and discusses implications for urban planning. The major comparisons include group characteristics of the entrepreneurs, key players who promote the area (merchants vs. developers), spatial needs (public vs. private space), expressions of cultural identity, and municipal interventions. Despite differences presented in the inner-city and suburban contexts, both cases call for special attentions from urban planning because these ethnic retail neighbourhoods are an important part of the community and should be taken into consideration during the community building process. The lessons drawn from historic precedents to date will offer reflections on the practice of planning and community building for the future. The paper also attempts to inform planning authorities the importance of treating ethnic retail neighbourhoods as an integral part of the community in order to achieve long-term sustainability of these areas.
Multicultural Planning in Toronto: Past and Present Mohammad Qadeer, Queen’s University, emeritus
Session D8: To Speak of Planning is to Speak of Unwin: Celebrating the Legacy of Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) Session I: Iconic Planner: Design, Democracy and Dialogue Chair: Robert Freestone, University of New South Wales Comment: Mary Corbin Sies, University of Maryland
Housing Policy Legacies: Clarence Stein’s Debt to Raymond Unwin Kristin Larsen, University of Florida
Excepting its brief World War I experiment sponsoring housing projects in centers of industry, the U.S. federal government offered assistance for low-cost rental housing for the first time during the Depression. Progressive housers advocated for federal support as a means to
80 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 apply innovations in design and community building. Clarence Stein’s policy making experience as Chair of the NewYork Housing and Regional Planning Commission (HRPC) from 1923 to 1926 granted him valuable insight on housing policy and program development. Further, Stein’s network of colleagues who promoted innovation in housing and town design, among them Raymond Unwin; familiarity with model government initiatives in Europe; and experience in large-scale residential development in the U.S. informed his advocacy of investment housing as a critical element of the U.S. housing toolbox during and immediately following the Great Depression.
In 1933, under the umbrella of the Public Works Administration (PWA) Housing Division, the limited dividend program, steeped in the philanthropic tradition, targeted private sector partners to design and develop large-scale rental projects while two other temporary programs involved direct public sector assistance. As the decade wore on, these approaches diverged into insurance for mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the United States Housing Authority’s (USHA) permanent public housing program. As such, they reflect the two enduring approaches to developing government-assisted housing. This paper examines limited dividend or “investment” housing, as Stein came to call it, as another critical element of U.S. housing policy. Further, it explores the roots of the program as promoted by Stein, in the work of Unwin, and others, such as members of the Housing Study Guild, by examining primary and secondary sources such as unpublished papers, lectures, government documents, letters, and contemporary publications. In addition to providing insight on early housing policy, this paper establishes a better understanding of the dynamic between Stein and Unwin as advocates of a government role in housing.
Democratizing Design: Raymond Unwin’s Housing Imperative Mervyn Miller, Independent Scholar and Architect
Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) was such a towering international figure in the field of the development of the profession and practice of City and Regional planning that the forthcoming 150th anniversary of his birth, which falls on 2 November 2013 merits appropriate commemoration in this Conference.
His interest in housing standards was a golden thread of ‘practical socialism’, which guided him from his adolescence in Oxford, when he heard John Ruskin and William Morris decrying the environmental consequences of hasty industrialisation. In the 1880s, Unwin took an engineering apprenticeship, and also became Secretary of the Manchester Branch of Morris’s Socialist League. Planning mining villages for an expanding colliery company revealed the limitations of regulation through public health byelaws, but architectural partnership with Barry Parker (1867-1947) who later became his brother-in-law revealed the potential of the enlightened application of Arts and Crafts principles to housing design.
Many years ago, Sir Frederic Osborn, (1885-1979), one of the key figures in the Garden City movement told me that one of Unwin’s greatest achievements was ‘democratisation of design’ for housing. This can be traced through Unwin’s writing from 1900 onwards including his contribution to the Garden City Association’s conference in Bournville, which assisted his gaining the commissions for New Earswick, York (1902) and Letchworth Garden City (1904).
81 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Criticised about the cost of the housing at Letchworth, Unwin replied that a small increase in wages would enable working class families to enjoy the new standards, which were subsequently transferred to the ‘artisans’ quarter’ at Hampstead Garden Suburb (1907-9). His tract, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (1912) drew a general theory which governed the layout and design of state-subsidised public housing under the 1919 Housing Act. ‘England’s Housing Example’ was highly influential from its initiation, particularly in Germany and later in the United States, where Unwin became a mentor to the newly formed National Association of Housing Officials in 1934, and undertook many tours with them across the United States until his final summer of 1939. Housing also played a prominent part in the syllabus of his annual courses at Columbia University. A surviving fragment of a broadcast recording from the opening of a Housing Exhibition in New York has Unwin, as patriarch of planning intoning the virtue of Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, his guiding mantra over 30 years.
The purpose of this paper is to trace the way in which the concept of democratisation of design developed from his formative years yet underlay the significant landmarks of his life and career.
Atlantic Crossing: John Nolen, Raymond Unwin, and the Synergy Which Established the Planning Profession Bruce Stephenson, Rollins College
John Nolen and Raymond Unwin’s synergetic relationship embodied the “Atlantic Crossings” that produced, Daniel Rogers writes, “a world mart of useful and intensely interesting experiments.” They designed iconic garden cities that still inform town planners, and their seminal works: Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice (1909) and Nolen’s New Towns for Old (1926) have been reprinted. The two men rose to the pinnacle of their profession and were key players in the international planning network that took shape before World War I. In 1913, Ebenezer Howard was elected the first president of the International Garden City Association, a position he held until his death in 1928. Unwin succeeded Howard and, in 1931 Nolen succeeded Unwin. Late in their careers, the two men took up university teaching (Nolen at Harvard and Unwin at Columbia University), as they tried to reconcile garden city principles with the modernist planning regimen.
From their first meeting in 1911, Nolen and Unwin became fast friends. Close in age and interests, they corresponded regularly for twenty-five years, exchanging social views, planning expertise, and their visions of a new urban civilization. They developed a close personal relationship, their families enjoyed vacations together and as their children grew into young adults they would visit their “foster families” in England and America. Their professional bond focused on the garden city, which they interpreted, assessed and, in the end, translated into a prototype for professional practice. The two men came from different backgrounds, Nolen was a landscape architect and Unwin was a civil engineer, but they held fast to the garden city and practiced their craft as an art. This paper documents a relationship that grew out of a common desire to bring the garden city ideal to fruition and, over time, their relationship documents the limits and potential of a profession they helped found.
82 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Session D9: Competing Market Logics of Preservation and Renewal: Seeking a Common Ground Chair: Randall Mason, University of Pennsylvania Comment: Randall Mason, University of Pennsylvania
Gentrification, Preservation, and Public Memory: Campus Expansion at the University of Illinois-Chicago, 1985-2004 Richard Anderson, Princeton University
This paper examines the expansion of the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) campus and the resulting spatial transformation of the surrounding neighborhood from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. I argue that the successive waves of gentrification constituted a historical narrative rendered in the urban landscape. The university, Chicago municipal government, and private developers crafted a story about the neighborhood that alternately commodified its rich history of ethnic diversity while obfuscating the university’s decades-long role in enervating the local community and displacing its residents.
The original UIC campus opened in 1965 after bitter opposition from the neighborhood’s Italian-American, Mexican-American, and African-American residents, as well as associates of Hull House, which stood in the center of the future campus. Designated an urban renewal zone by the city, the area around UIC–known by then as “University Village”–transformed into a magnet for middle-class housing and commercial developments during the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1980s, UIC–originally an exclusively commuter campus–build its first dormitories, leading the university to seek further commercial redevelopment in the area to benefit its residential students. In the early-1990s the university proposed a new expansion project involving athletic fields, dormitories, private residential housing, and retail. After a protracted legal fight, the university demolished the Maxwell Street commercial district, which at mid- century had been home to Jewish immigrant businesses and the vibrant Chicago blues scene created by African-Americans transplanted from the South. UIC also seized vacant city land that had hosted the historic Maxwell Street open-air market every Sunday for more than a century. The most recent redevelopment of University Village mirrored a larger postindustrial shift in the political economy of the United States toward the service and knowledge sectors. Furthermore, it dovetailed with the ascendancy of neoliberal American urban policy since the 1970s. City officials, university administrators, and real estate developers re-shaped the neighborhood in line with a set of neoliberal values that harnessed public sector money to private sector ends– privileging corporations, investors, and middle-class residents at the expense of working-class communities.
Drawing on research in the archives of UIC and the city of Chicago, I argue that the trajectory of Chicago’s political economy marks the built environment of University Village. The UIC campus and the surrounding neighborhood serve as sites of preservation, memory, and forgetting. The university, the city, and private developers employed monuments, streetscapes, a small number of historically preserved buildings, and the UIC-owned Hull House Museum (maintained in the mansion that served as the first home of Jane Addams’s settlement house) in order to craft a largely celebratory narrative about the history of the campus and the university’s putatively benevolent role in the city and especially the adjacent communities. The landscape of
83 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
University Village can thus be “read” for clues to the history of class, race, and political economy in Chicago.
Home Rule in the Age of Urban Renewal: Historic-District Formation in Boston’s Back Bay, 1963-1966 George Walter Born, Boston University
This paper will examine a significant case study in urban historic-preservation planning – the push to designate a local historic district in Boston’s Back Bay. While an energetic mayor pushed for liberalizing neighborhood height restrictions in effect for the previous 60 years, many area residents supported a countermeasure to strengthen local control against unwanted development. A dense network of individuals and organizations (both ad hoc and long- established) joined the debate. At the heart of the issue lay the question: Can a neighborhood be revitalized with existing building stock, or must tall, new buildings be built? Partisans on different sides of the dispute marshaled arguments, many of an economic character, to strengthen their claims.
I argue that this controversy serves as an illuminating case study where competing notions of economic value and public interest played out in the world of big-city politics and urban renewal in the 1960s. I also maintain that the conflict, while seemingly a David-and- Goliath story of a neighborhood fighting City Hall, is in fact an intramural quarrel among competing elites. Finally, I link this movement to evolving notions of citizen participation in planning, changes in the local and national political culture, and increasing claims for neighborhood self-determination against city and state authority.
Employing methodologies developed by sociologists to study social movements and the ways in which organizations and individuals mobilize resources to advance their goals, I have consulted newspaper articles, city and state archives, neighborhood association records, and neighborhood residents to parse the complex positioning of people and groups concerning the preservation and development of one of America’s most admired urban neighborhoods.
This study fills a significant void in the scholarship of historic preservation, urban renewal, and neighborhood revitalization. Historians of the preservation movement have generally focused on late nineteenth and early twentieth century efforts, before most large American cities embraced historic-district ordinances. Meanwhile, scholars of urban renewal have concerned themselves with the large-scale planning and building for which that era is known, rather than on concurrent conservation of existing historic resources. And historians of subsequent urban revitalization largely leave historic-district creation unanalyzed, even though it is a conspicuous part of this era.
Emotional Preservation vs. Rational Development: Rethinking the Divide at the Former Bethlehem Steel Headquarters Chloe Taft, Yale University
In the mid-1990s, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation hired Enterprise Development, a James Rouse firm, to pursue a heritage-based development plan for the oldest section of its
84 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 headquarter steel plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which stopped steel production in 1995. Although this plan did not materialize before Bethlehem Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001 and the land was sold, the expectation that parts of the plant would be preserved had by then taken hold in the community. In 2006, the Las Vegas Sands Corp. won a state license to build an industrial-themed casino on the brownfield site based in part on its professed commitment to preserve as many of the original plant buildings as possible on the rest of the site.
My paper, based on in-depth ethnographic interviews, archival research, and an analysis of the built environment, addresses competing visions today of which of these buildings should be saved and relates these views to their holders’ economic ideals. Some casino employees, for example, believe the remaining plant buildings are eyesores and should be torn down and rebuilt like Las Vegas, emphasizing a neoliberal economic model that renders the past obsolete. Others, including many former steelworkers, attach memories of what they perceived as a more stable and committed manufacturing economy to the buildings and want to see them preserved. In particular, I look at the two Bethlehem Steel corporate headquarter buildings that remain standing and vacant – one dating to the early twentieth century that is in danger of demolition, and one completed in 1972 that recently gained special exception to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I suggest that from a binary of “emotional” preservation and “rational” development emerges an unrealized opportunity to reassert local memory of a past, one that signaled corporate commitment to people and place, in a way that is complementary to future-oriented growth.
Session D10: Creative Places Chair: Deborah Leslie, University of Toronto Comment: Audience
Why a Studio Without a Backlot Isn’t Like a Ten-Story Building Without an Elevator: Land Planning in the Postfordist Film Industry Stephanie Frank, University of Missouri, Kansas City
Six months after taking over the presidency of Twentieth Century Fox (Fox) in 1962, Darryl F. Zanuck wrote in a memo, “A Studio without a backlot is like a ten story office building without elevators. It is not practical.” Zanuck criticized the previous president, Spyros P. Skouras, for what Zanuck thought was a shortsighted move in the 1960s to sell the bulk of the studio’s more than 280 acres to create Century City, a midcentury Modernist city within a city, which became an important economic and cultural node in Los Angeles. In the years after the sale of the land, Fox’s management planned multiple new ventures for production space and other real estate developments, struggling to adjust to the postfordist shift in the film industry after a 1948 Supreme Court mandate separated the major studios from their lucrative theater chains, forcing the dissolution of the vertically-integrated industry. Because Zanuck thought a studio could not be profitable without an extensive backlot, or outdoor collection of semi-permanent sets, Fox pressed forward with plans for new studio facilities and accompanying real estate developments for profit. However, Zanuck was mistaken, as Fox and other major studios survived without extensive backlots and transformed their operations to suit new business models. As I have argued elsewhere, film studios, as large
85 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 landowners, shaped the urban development of metropolitan Los Angeles as a result of dramatic shifts in the business model of the film industry. This paper, drawing from Fox’s administrative records on land planning for the company, illuminates the role of private companies in planning and urban development as well as industrial land planning, both underexamined facets of planning history that enrich our understanding of the development of metropolitan America.
Planning for the Cultural City: Creative Economic Development Policy in Toronto and New York Shoshanah D. Goldberg-Miller, The New School
Cities throughout the world are exploring the ways that arts and culture can serve as an economic engine, build name recognition and become a source of civic pride. Through a mix of policy, branding and economic development, these municipalities have the opportunity to create economic growth and a more vibrant quality of life by incorporating public art, theatres, festivals, cultural districts, the repurposing of buildings and land, and other amenities into their planning and policy implementation. This paper explores the relationship between cultural policy and arts and culture options on the economic development agendas in Toronto and New York over the decade of the 2000s, and examines the ways that both cities chose to adopt creative city strategies. Through a comparative case study of New York and Toronto, I investigate how municipal cultural policy became part of the economic development lexicon in each city. Informed by 42 semi-structured interviews and archival and historical research, this analysis offers options for policymakers, cultural stakeholders and policy entrepreneurs, both in the cities under study and elsewhere.
During the 2000s, both Toronto and New York were successful in articulating new, economic arguments for arts and culture. As a result of this integrated agenda setting, cultural districts were built in both cities, creative workers were attracted and retained, and financial investments in the cultural built environment were made both by the government and the private sector. The findings from this investigation provide policymakers and urban stakeholders with recommendations on utilizing arts and culture as viable options in today’s municipal economic development toolkits.
In each city, the new focus on arts and culture within the economic development agenda developed in response to a shock experienced during the early part of the decade. For Toronto, this was the endogenous shock of the center city’s amalgamation with surrounding areas, and for New York it was the exogenous shock of 9/11. The priority for Toronto was the reimagining of its potential as a culture center in order to enter the knowledge economy; while for New York the focus was on recovery from a disaster. In both cities, arts and culture were employed as a part of the economic development toolkit to revitalize decaying areas, attract residents and tourists, and distinguish themselves from other cities.
There is increasing recognition by policymakers of the efficacy of arts and culture as a valuable potential component within the economic development toolkit. However,
86 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 gaining a place for arts and culture on the economic development agenda often remains a challenge. Housing, transportation, the environment, the economy, and jobs creation and retention are among the other topics competing for the attention of elected officials and the public. In addition, while economic development priorities include the strengthening and sometimes rebuilding of city centers as magnets for leisure, work and tourism, the focus often is on more immediate forms of revenue creation. Finally, differences in goals and priorities among stakeholders in the public, private and nonprofit sectors can make collaboration a challenge.
Analyzing how arts and culture have penetrated the clutter of policy options on Toronto and New York’s economic development agendas has produced three key principles for policymakers: 1) Strategic integration: integrate arts and culture into a broadly focused economic development framework that incorporates both economic and social benefit; 2) Partnership development: build and cultivate relationships and stakeholder partnerships across policy domains and throughout sectors, and 3) Research and planning: use research and strategic planning to analyze how arts and culture interventions could support the municipal economic development agenda and subsequently be integrated into a variety of key policy interventions.
PAPER SESSION E
Session E1: Roundtable: Cold War Cities Chair: Matthew Farrish, University of Toronto Comment: David Monteyne, University of Calgary
Cherbourg during the Cold War: Class Alliance and Urban Atmosphere in a French Arsenal City Lindsey Freeman, SUNY Buffalo
Cherbourg’s military past is long. As is the case with the cities of Brest or Lorient, the city was created by the French state to function as a naval base, initially to fight against the British Royal Navy. The construction of the Arsenal began under Louis XIV and was officially inaugurated under Napoleon III. Despite its deep history as a military stronghold for the French state, a major change occurs after WWII, the Arsenal goes nuclear and specializes in the building of nuclear submarines. The city becomes defined by the Gaullist decision to build an independent French “force de frappe” with planes and submarines able to launch nuclear weapons at the drop of hat. Here we explore the extent to which the city became identified with its new industry — if Cherbourg’s citizens became “people of the submarine” in the same way those working in the U.S. Cold War nuclear labs became in Hugh Gusterson’s term “people of the bomb”. The city’s history is full of social tension and the Cold War magnified and complicated many of these relationships. The Arsenal employed around 5,000 workers who organized into reformist and revolutionary unions, leading to the emergence of a new political elite. This elite won City Hall in 1977 and with this new power radically reshaped the city— physically, socially, and culturally. This paper seeks to explore the urban Cold War atmosphere of Cherbourg from 1957 to 1989, by focusing on the relationships and struggles between various
87 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 social movements and a new political elite including, the French Communist Party, the French state, and the French Navy.
Post-War Berlin East and West: Show-window of the Cold War Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College
Postwar Berlin has often been called a show-window of the Cold War and its urban form, function, military construction, and transnational connections after 1945 provide a lens for multiple aspects of that history. This paper focuses on three periods of Cold War history and their impact on East and West Berlin. It explores how the governments of Eastern and Western Berlin and their respective states prepared visions and implemented plans for their own zone in reference to global alliances. The first period, between 1945 and the construction of the Wall in 1961, starts with a brief examination of the early years, when a single Berlin appeared possible as illustrated in the visionary modernist Kollektivplan (1945/6). The increasing division of the city in East and West resulted shortly thereafter in major contrasting urban interventions including the Stalin-Allee in the East (1951-3)— inspired by Moscow—and the INTERBAU planning exhibition of 1957 in the West—featuring modernist “American” design principles—as well as two contrasting capital city planning competitions around 1958. Different capitalist and socialist ideologies characterized the period from 1961 to 1979 that saw the construction of the heavily guarded military zone of the Berlin Wall and the rewriting of the respective city centers and the construction of surprisingly similar public housing districts on the periphery. The last period, characterized by slow de-escalation and by Gorbatschow’s reform policies lasted until the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and featured separate postmodernist attempts at urban transformation on both sides of the wall, contrasting the International Building Exhibition in Berlin West (1987) with neo-historical features using prefabricated elements in East Berlin’s center. The paper concludes by examining the multiple ties that link urban phenomena in East and West Berlin to transnational Cold War history.
Fighting the Cold War with Homeownership: American Housing Aid and Antisquatter Campaigns in Manila, Philippines, 1946-1986 Nancy H. Kwak, UC-San Diego
In 1952, the Special Committee on Un-Filipino Activities sounded a clear warning to the Philippine people: “Under Communist rule… we could not own homes. All real estate would belong to the Government which, in turn, would be in the hands of the Communist Party.” Only the current system of democracy and free enterprise would guarantee “the greatest degree of freedom, coupled with the highest standard of living ever experienced in Southeast Asia.” Alas, such rousing, self- laudatory rhetoric belied the realities of postwar housing in the archipelago and in Greater Manila in particular. Like their counterparts in other exploding cities of the post-1945 world, Manila residents struggled with rapidly proliferating shantytowns and informal settlements; countless squatters crowded into the city center in search of work, and self--built structures mushroomed along the unoccupied estuaries of the Pasig River, on the edges of functioning rail lines, and on public and private properties of all sorts.
American housing experts decried this sort of slum proliferation and informal land
88 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 occupation as a hazard to the health of citizens, and even more critically, to the health of democratic governance. Slums bred Communist agitation, according to Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) and Department of State workers like Jacob Crane and Roy Burroughs. The US needed to help Filipinos establish a legitimate housing market by regularizing land titles, streamlining household savings, and otherwise ensuring greater participation in a capitalist system. From the American point of view, housing could prove the decisive tool in securing literal citizen “buy in” to a capitalist state. “We are selling democracy and buying security at a nominal cost through this [international housing] program,” HHFA staff Dan Hamady noted.
This emphasis on squatter clearance and homeownership had tremendous, and often devastating consequences for informal dwellers in Greater Manila. Filipino and American housing experts worked together to devise housing policies that removed shantytowns from vital urban land to remote “metropolitan” and semi-rural locations; they also built key agencies like the National Housing Authority and the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council to manage and regularize the process. This paper takes a closer look at the Cold War motives behind the origin of these early squatter relocation campaigns, and the impact both had on the urban landscape and on its poorest urban dwellers in particular.
Civil Defense Begins in the City: Policy Implementation and Local Response in Baltimore During the 1950s Eric Singer, American University
In her 2000 book Civil Defense Begins at Home, Laura McEnaney argued that the message of “self-help” was a cornerstone of federal civil defense policy in the early 1950s. McEnaney explained that self-help civil defense required “citizen consumers” to buy items necessary to save their own lives in the event of an attack, as opposed to relying on “atomic welfare.” Consequently, the FCDA tried to convince Americans through public relations efforts that effective civil defense was not a question of national security as much as it was a question of personal responsibility. According to McEnaney, “the government’s call for self-help popularized preparedness, but it also enabled various citizen groups to interpret and enact its precepts in ways that departed from official FCDA scripts.”
Self-help in Baltimore translated into community help, as civil defense volunteers who bought those messages worked with Baltimore’s civil defense director between 1952 and 1959 to ensure the survivability of their neighborhoods. Though the FCDA changed its objectives many times between 1950 and 1958, its early public relations efforts made a significant and lasting impact upon Baltimore’s civil defense planners and volunteers. Aided by the Advertising Council and executives of the ad firm BBD&O, the FCDA spent millions of dollars on messaging designed to convince people that they, their neighborhoods and their cities would survive a nuclear attack.
The resilience of community help, urban survivability and civilian control messaging is evidence of how profound policy shifts at the federal level throughout the 1950s had little effect in Baltimore. Though the FCDA shifted focus from individual shelter to mass evacuation after the Soviet Union appeared to have successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, evacuation never became a major aspect of Baltimore’s active civil defense planning. Drills like
89 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
FCDA’s Operation Alert and similar local exercises did assume that the city would evacuate after a hydrogen bomb attack, but the results of those drills further confirmed the fact that evacuation was implausible. Though Baltimore’s Civil Defense Organization (BCDO) had established citywide evacuation plans, school civil defense officials did not seriously contemplate evacuation of Baltimore’s schools until late 1957. By that time, the federal government had long abandoned evacuation in favor of mass shelter, a plan that itself was never realized.
The lag time between federal conceptualization of civil defense policy and its discussion at the local level was particularly problematic given the rapidly-changing dynamics of the nuclear age. Curiously, those changing and confusing dynamics resulted in continuity of local civil defense policy in Baltimore from 1952 to 1959. Local officials, some increasingly critical of federal civil defense policy, continued to implement civil defense with whatever tangible materials the FCDA had provided them in the early 1950s. Those materials emphasized the preservation, not the abandonment, of the community and the city.
Session E2: Community Action Amidst Urban Crisis Chair: Pierre Clavel, Cornell University Comment: Pierre Clavel, Cornell University
Urban Triage: Planning for Decline in 1970s Cleveland and St Louis Patrick Cooper-McCann, University of Michigan
This paper investigates the origins of “urban triage,” a controversial planning policy, first proposed in St. Louis in 1974 and Cleveland in 1975, that called for shifting community development resources away from urban areas experiencing severe decline in favor of “middle” areas experiencing only slight decline, with the goal of stabilizing the greatest part of the city with the least resources. Similar policies are being proposed today in response to enduring population loss and fiscal crisis in cities like Youngstown, Flint, and Detroit, but few contemporary planners are aware of the previous cases or the body of planning literature that arose in response to them. Using planning records, newspaper accounts, and interviews with planners involved in the cases, this paper defines and analyzes the logic of urban triage through the cases of Cleveland and St. Louis, situating the policy as a response to a deepening fiscal and urban crisis, cutbacks in federal aid, and the transition from categorical federal grants to block grants. It also places urban triage in the context of a broader dialogue on urban shrinkage that took place between the 1970s and 1980s, analyzing the contextual and political factors that affected the willingness of planners, politicians, and the public to consider or reject planning for shrinkage rather than growth.
Shared Work as Protest: “Community Commons” as Spaces of Struggle in 1960s Philadelphia Anna G. Goodman, UC Berkeley
This paper offers a historical analysis the role of "community commons" in addressing urban inequality in American cities. Focusing on Philadelphia during the early 1960s, a city
90 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 characterized by racial struggle and "white flight," this paper analyzes the work of landscape architect Karl Linn, along with University of Pennsylvania students, as they physically constructed community commons– green spaces, gardens and playgrounds – with low-income African American communities surrounding the university's campus. The effort targeted the environmental cost of suburbanization and the urban renewal that destroyed poor and minority neighborhoods in the 1950s, taking advantage of an innovative "Land Utilization Program" that allowed the city to seize tax-delinquent properties and turn them over to communities for shared use. In this paper, I argue that an idea of shared work and the positive value of green space aligned politically distinct groups – portions of the African-American community, settlement house workers, religious groups, students and professionals. In so doing, the paper pays particular attention to how institutional actors, including the university, local government agencies and philanthropic organizations, supported and were shaped by negotiations across class and race.
Today, as post-industrial decline is compounded by the international fiscal-debt crisis, American scholars have revived the notion of community commons. Planners, including the Poppers, June Thomas and Margaret Dewar have written of the potential of commons to address vacant land management and environmental justice issues in shrinking cities. Political theorists Hardt and Negri have explore the idea of commons as part of an ethics of democratic political action. This paper considers these ideas in relation to the history of actual existing commons experiments. In so doing, it complicates our picture of an American collective dissent in the form of shared work and its relationship to local politics of race and class.
Session E3: Reconceptualizing Suburban Space Chair: Aaron Cavin, DePauw University Comment: Aaron Cavin, DePauw University
Marshall Erdman’s “Doctor’s Parks” and the Challenges of Zoning in the Postwar American Suburbs, 1945-1965 Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In 1954, Marshall Erdman – a merchant builder based in Madison, Wisconsin – began constructing his first “doctors park.” A collection of ten compact, one-story buildings accommodating facilities for one and three doctors each, the Madison Doctors Park was the result of a protracted land use battle, largely because of the property’s proximity to an exclusive enclave of single-family homes. The permissive residential zoning Erdman ultimately secured for the 10 acre property permitted the doctors park, but with some restrictions; Erdman was required to design and build the medical facilities in keeping with the suburban character of the adjacent residential neighborhood. He likened the roughly one thousand square foot medical buildings to “small houses,” with landscaping around each building (and ample parking). Erdman also suggested the small buildings also related to one another in much the same way as houses in the burgeoning postwar suburbs did; they allowed doctors to maintain their independent practices and specialties while also facilitating collaboration with other doctors in the park as needed. This park and hundreds of others like it that Erdman built essentially reflected as well as shaped a form of “suburbanized
91 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 medicine,” which took doctors out of congested downtown hospitals and brought medical services where it was needed most: the rapidly expanding postwar suburbs.
In building these parks and the roughly 2000 buildings that constituted them during the second half of the twentieth century, Erdman and his clients frequently came face to face with zoning appeals boards and planning commissions. This paper examines Erdman’s struggles with zoning as he built these parks as a means of considering the close relationship between zoning and new postwar suburban building forms during the decades after World War II. Like builders everywhere, Erdman sought to reconcile the dominant residential zoning in the suburbs with the fact that the growing suburban population demanded an array of services – in zoning terms, land uses – of which medical care was one. I look to Erdman’s particular battles with rezonings and variances in order to better understand the contentious relationship between the pressures of postwar suburbanization on the one hand and zoning on the other, particular Euclidean zoning that dominated during the postwar decades. For suburban builders like Erdman, reconciling these competing demands in front of planning commissions and zoning boards of appeals formed a major part of their livelihood after World War II.
Erdman’s medical buildings represent an interesting case study of a common suburban architectural building type – the suburban doctors office – that was at odds with zoning in the postwar period. Looking at conflicts of this sort allows for better understanding of the history of both zoning and suburban architecture, and in turn, enables a richer understanding of the postwar American suburban landscape in general. Far more than a vast sea of single-family houses, the suburbs contained other kinds of buildings that should be understood against the backdrop of zoning and the various appeals launched by builders such as Erdman, who relentlessly pursued building contracts in the suburban landscape that would bring services to a swelling residential population.
Double Agents and the New Suburban History Andrew Friedman, Haverford College
The suburbs of Northern Virginia—defined by its signature institutions, the CIA and the Pentagon—developed in an embrace with the everyday lives, practices of habitation and transnational labor of geopolitical double agents. These were Americans in the federal government who secretly worked for the KGB. This essay explores the ways they, alongside their Soviet handlers, used suburbia.
As a study of the American suburbs after World War II, this paper accompanies other scholarship of the New Suburban History in critiquing master narratives of generic American middle-class suburbanization nationally by mining the particular cultural contours of this specific suburb outside Washington, D.C. It questions accounts that cast suburbia as a banal, conformist place by telling the stories of people who occupied the landscape with a radical, even treasonous, non-conformity. It focuses on one agent in particular, Robert Hanssen. Hanssen was an Opus Dei Catholic, an avid father, a loving suburban husband, a do-it-yourself hobbyist, a government employee, a frustrated commuter, an ardent political conservative, and a man who enjoyed walking his dog Sundae in the park near his nice house on a cul-de-sac. He also spent 20 years
92 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 spying for the KGB. This paradox holds a challenge for suburban historians. This essay takes up the challenge.
To double agents and KGB officers, suburbia was a site not just of meaningful activity— or a space that “represented” and enacted Cold War tropes like “containment” domestically, as it has been portrayed—but a literal staging ground for a critical global politics. Foreign affairs were articulated through the immediate actions of everyday life. Yet, in illuminating the practices of this unstudied community of suburbanites, this essay cautions against discarding some key suburban tropes, albeit ones that have limited a complex interpretation of suburbs in the past. The reason is simple: Double agents used clichés about the suburbs. Privacy, conformity, family life, sexual infidelity, racial exclusion and middle-class conventions provided a prefabricated cover story. The nature of suburban form as an open, individualized platform and framework for the creation of meaning and self was the exact quality of space that allowed double agents to do their work. They counted on the quiet rhythms of suburban park space, the agreements about what constituted private life that dominated the expectations of single- family suburban houses, and the consumer habits of local malls and parking lots. Their counter- uses of suburban space overturned assumptions about generic suburban landscapes. But they also operated in a dialectical relationship with archetypal assumptions about use and place. Studying double agents’ uses of suburban spaces and cultural narratives thus explores one further important avenue of analysis for the new suburban historiography: the question of how suburbanites mediated the representational “idea” of the suburbs, however stereotypical, in and through everyday life practices.
The Planning and Development of Shorewood, Wisconsin Neal A. Johnson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Shorewood, Wisconsin is “at the edge of the city and the heart of everything” and perhaps one of its biggest claims is that it is a truly walkable urban village; after all, “It’s all within walking distance in Shorewood.” Shorewood is a small village of 1.59 square miles bordering Milwaukee on the northeastern edge of the city. The Village separated from the town of Milwaukee in 1900 when it became the Village of East Milwaukee. The Village would later rename itself Shorewood in 1917 to further distinguish itself from its big brother. While the Village first served as a bastion for the wealthy, over time Shorewood transformed itself into the more economically diverse community that it is today. This paper looks at Shorewood’s historical development patterns throughout the twentieth century to understand its current urban form. Unlike many post WWII suburbs, Shorewood is a densely populated urban village that was planned around pedestrians and urban rail systems, not the private automobile. It also has a rich architectural history that the Village has been careful to maintain over the past century. However, Shorewood could not totally escape the urban renewal that took place in parts of the Village in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This presents the context for an exploration of Shorewood’s architectural and planning history that can best be understood as community planning. Shorewood has a rich history that can be easily observed by simply taking a stroll along any of the Village’s streets all of which display the diversity and vitality of this carefully planned community.
93 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Session E4: To Speak of Planning is to Speak of Unwin: Celebrating the Legacy of Sir Raymond Unwin (1863-1940) Session II: Iconic Plans: Town Planning in Practice Chair: Mervyn Miller, Heritage Advisory Group Letchworth Garden City Co-Comment: Robert Freestone, University of New South Wales Co-Comment: Mary Corbin Sies, University of Maryland
One Hundred Years in the Making: The Creation and Protection of Raymond Unwin’s Legacy at Hampstead Garden Suburb David Davidson, Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust
Clarence S. Stein wrote “I know of no housing development in England of the last half century that has greater charm or shows greater skill in site planning than does Hampstead Garden Suburb.” This paper aims to explain precisely what Unwin created at Hampstead Garden Suburb and how the special characteristics of his achievement are protected today.
Creation It will outline of the aims of the original Trust, its structure and membership. Set out the vision of Henrietta Barnett, the founder of the Suburb and its driving force. Explain how the land was developed – the letting of plots, the architects employed, the role of the consultant architect. The work of the Garden Suburb Development Company (Hampstead) Limited. The work of Unwin’s office in vetting plans, setting standards and retaining control on behalf of the Trust. Unwin’s vision – the grain of development and how it differs from Garden Cities like Letchworth and Welwyn. Illustrations from “Town Planning in Practice”.
Protection The Leasehold Reform Act and the threats to the Suburb. Re-founding the Trust. The present Trust’s unique role in protecting the special qualities of the area. Its powers. Its Trustees. Its staff and structure. The tools it uses. The importance of the Trust’s level of detailed understanding of the subtleties of Unwin's development in controlling change. What can the Trust achieve that a local planning authority could not do? The impact of land values on management today. Pressures for development. The dangers in Unwin’s generous layout and the threats from infill and excessive development. How well has the Suburb survived its first 100 years?
Preserving and Maintaining the Concept of Letchworth Garden City John Lewis, Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation
Letchworth Garden City is the world’s first Garden City. The Heritage Foundation is a self- funding charitable organisation re-investing rental income for the long term community benefit of Letchworth Garden City. We are descended from First Garden City Limited formed in 1903, the original developers. We administer the Scheme of Management, created under the Leasehold Reform Act 1967, enabling continued management of properties, where the owners have purchased their lease. We consider the legacy of Raymond Unwin is invaluable and strive to preserve the principles of his master plan. As advocates for the Garden City Model, we highlight the importance of these design principles, which are beyond being solely of historic
94 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 importance and readily translate to modern interpretation, relevant today. The Foundation has also continued Howard’s model of the capture of value for return to the community.
Scheme of Management The SoM applies to residential properties on land leased from Heritage Foundation or its predecessors, and excludes the large post 1945 Estates compulsorily purchased from First Garden City Limited. It applies an additional tier of control, an Estate Management function entirely separate from the statutory planning process. It retains properties as single dwellings, preventing plot splits and small scale demolition and re-development, and more importantly controls of the external appearance of dwellings. Alterations such as replacement windows, hard standings, solar panels as well as extensions, require our approval, which also includes works to trees and front hedges. The objective is to preserve the group value, as their cumulative value is the key to maintaining the character of Letchworth. The scheme applies beyond early Garden City homes, although standards can be stricter on early or special properties (including those listed under planning legislation). We receive annually about 1,000 pre-application and formal application submissions and our Estates Team administers these. In order to provide clarity we have adopted Design Standards, which were subject to community consultation.
The Social Model and Reinvestment At the heart of the Garden City concept is the social model of capturing land value for the benefit of the local community, unique at town scale in the UK. The Foundation is focussed on meeting its charitable commitments, which are:
· Environment and Learning; Education and Learning; · Recreation and Leisure; · Health and Well Being; · Local Based Charities; · and Charitable Activities. We reinvest the surplus from estate management back into the community though these commitments. Our governance structure for distribution rests not rest with the Executive, but our Governors and Board of Trustees, the membership of which is either elected by the local community, nominated by local clubs and societies or appointed by the Heritage Foundation. Our Board also includes Councillor representatives from the District and County Councils. We have over past years sought to involve the community in our strategic decision making, meaning far greater community involvement in schemes such as the Town Centre Implementation Plan.
Session E5: Aspects of Postwar Transportation Planning In and Around Toronto Chair: Pierre Filion, University of Waterloo Comment: Viv Nelles, McMaster University
Subway Building and the Rise and Fall of a Balanced Transportation System for Toronto, ca. 1940s-1970s Jay Young, McMaster University
95 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Toronto embarked upon an ambitious subway building program from the 1940s to the 1970s, when the city built almost 55 kilometres of rapid transit across one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in North America. The belief that Toronto required improved infrastructure - not only for cars but also for transit - had existed within its planning circles since at least the 1940s, and more prominently than most cities on the continent. Such sentiment led to plans in 1964 for a “balanced” transportation system of expressways and rapid transit for Metro Toronto. Although Toronto completed all the subway lines listed in the plan, numerous expressways were never built.
Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff’s Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (2003) portrays rapid transit as a policy solution that emerged by the late 1960s, when a growing number of city dwellers opposed the harmful effects expressways had exerted on the natural and built environments of American cities. However, the unique chronology of subway building in Toronto illustrates that transit could be both part of the “great mega-project era” of the 1950s and 1960s, and a response to it. Toronto was exceptional in that much of its subway system’s construction took place during the “golden age” of postwar mass motorization on the continent. Yet criticism against the negative consequences of subways on the urban fabric became more prevalent in Toronto at the same time that many of its residents felt a renewed faith in transit, like many other North American cities.
My presentation will examine these political, social, and environmental dynamics of the plan for a balanced transportation system in Metro Toronto. In particular, it will focus on subway building from the 1940s to the 1970s, and the ways in which we can conceptualize shifts in thinking and policy about planning and urban transportation during these decades.
“The Streets Belong to the People”: The Significance of Toronto’s Spadina Expressway Battle in Canada, c. 1960-1975 Danielle Robinson, University of Toronto
In both the United States and Canada, post-WWII enthusiasm for urban planning produced master plans for cities, the centrepiece of which was city-wide transportation infrastructure. Inner-city expressway networks that stood to transform cities triggered widespread and protracted battles over urban growth and development. The dual symbolism of the roads as both a threat and a promise revealed deep divisions among and between residents and officials. No case was more closely followed, more influential, or more significant for Canadians than the Toronto battle over the planned Spadina Expressway. Typical of the inner urban expressways of the era, the road that threatened diverse and densely populated neighbourhoods and bustling commercial blocks was designed to link with other built and planned expressways encircling the city. It was eventually cancelled, but not without years of protests and political wrangling.
The narrative arc of expressway debates in Canadian cities was similar to that in other countries like the United States, England, Australia and New Zealand. The extensive freeway networks in many American cities initially seemed aspirational to expressway supporters. As the tide turned, these examples quickly became cautionary tales for opponents who argued against expressways and for supporters who maintained Canadian networks would not be like the
96 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
American systems. The American examples, however, were not nearly as meaningful to Canadian activists as the Toronto case. In city after city across Canada, those on both sides of the debates looked to Toronto for encouragement and the most accurate indication of whether expressways would be built. In Vancouver both sides consulted with Toronto figures on how best to make their case, and protestors upheld Ontario’s expressway cancellation as a model to emulate. In Edmonton and Winnipeg protestors admired Toronto activists for their role in stopping the expressway. Also in Winnipeg, city planners and officials studied the Spadina defeat in an effort to better understand the turn against inner city expressways. Like other activists, those in Montréal consulted with Toronto protestors and celebrated the defeat of the Ontario road. Finally in Halifax, skeptics questioned the appropriateness of an inner city expressway by comparing it to the size of the planned Toronto route. In all cases and for both sides, Toronto was the model -- for better or for worse -- to which all others were compared. In these respects, expressway disputes revealed how established national dynamics were evident in even the most raucous urban battles, and how large scale national history projects underscore the importance of the national experience in a transnational world.
Provincializing the Metropolis: Toronto and the Postwar Planning of Ontario’s Highways Jordan Baker, McMaster University
Highway development in twentieth century Ontario followed a pattern of reconstruction and improvement, much as it did elsewhere in North America. However, in Ontario this focus extended throughout the postwar period of massive highway development, greatly impacting the course of provincially administered regional and urban planning. This paper, drawing on extensive research at the Ontario Archives, maps how policymakers in postwar Ontario largely viewed the provincial highway system in terms of maintaining the mobility of the province and operating within a largely pre- existing infrastructure system. The presence of a large urban centre such as Toronto at multiple connections along the provincial highway system meant consolidating one mandate of establishing and reworking road hierarchies with another that concentrated on providing the means of mobility for everyone in the province. In this sense the urban areas in and around Toronto, in their various postwar political identities, were places that the Province of Ontario continually sought to maintain its highway connections with, but in a regulated manner that emphasized provincial transportation concerns. In the eyes of the province Toronto would not only be subject to significant regional planning controls; it would also be departmentally planned into the pre-existing provincial highway system. Toronto therefore became the location of a complex relationship between provincial highway planning, which emphasized regulated connections along proven corridors of travel, and the growth and expansion of the urban Metro area.
Session E6: Black Power Takes Form: Visions of Community Control in the American City Chair: Suleiman Osman, George Washington University Comment: Suleiman Osman, George Washington University
Defining Citizen Participation: Gender, Neighborhoods, and Black Politics in Birmingham, 1969-1979 Catherine Conner, University of South Florida
97 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Beginning in the 1920s, African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama, used civic leagues to improve and govern their neighborhoods. Infused with ideas of middle-class respectability, these leagues provided residents with social cohesion and a political vision to combat Jim Crow. Men ran the leagues, but women performed the essential legwork, from canvassing the neighborhoods to organizing social functions. But by the late 1960s, crime, unemployment, and chronic municipal neglect had destroyed neighborhoods and rendered the leagues impotent.
In the summer of 1969, a group of forty black women from the Collegeville neighborhood stormed Birmingham’s City Hall and demanded municipal attention for their neighborhood and the protection of their youth and young women. They were successful. Neighborhoods became sites of power as women gave tours of them for civic elites and municipal officials to see first-hand a way of life that was unknown to them. In doing so, women won crime prevention measures, public works programs, and water, sewer, and electric service for neighborhoods neglected during Jim Crow and forgotten during the post-industrial, post-civil rights era.
Black youth and men who led civic leagues, however, rejected the women’s politics of respectability, their engagement in cross-class biracial communication, and their use of neighborhoods as tools to gain a political voice in the city of Birmingham. When policies for federal funding pushed the city to develop a citizens’ participation program, men used the opportunity to usurp control of their neighborhoods from women and their elite allies. Women advocates, however, joined their critics in strengthening black political power located in neighborhoods, believing that a citizens participation program would aid in their cause of uplift and improvement. Inaugurated in 1975, the citizens participation plan gave all of Birmingham’s 100 neighborhoods a direct voice in municipal government and the allocation of funds. Moreover, it politicized neighborhood boundaries, creating spatial representation in a city that lacked council wards or districts.
Although this project of citizen participation began with women, men overwhelmingly became the presidents of these new systems of neighborhood governance and used them to launch city-wide political careers. Neighborhoods became the source of black male power in Birmingham, but their structural conditions and the everyday experience of living in them declined in importance on the municipal agenda.
“The Search for New Forms”: Black Power and Black Utopia in Harlem, 1967-69 Brian Goldstein, University of Wisconsin - Madison
This paper examines the spatial vision that emerged with the ascendance of Black Power in the late 1960s, using the example of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), the country’s first community design center. In the late 1960s, under the direction of African- American architect J. Max Bond, Jr., ARCH led demands for community control of Harlem’s built environment. In calling for the radical democratization of urban development, ARCH likewise called for a dramatic physical alternative to the city that urban renewal had typically wrought. Instead of the middle- class interests and commercial orientation that past redevelopment plans had often prioritized, ARCH and its collaborators imagined a community
98 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 centered on the manifold needs and demands of existing, predominantly low-income residents, including community controlled education, affordable housing, social services, and cultural facilities. Their schemes offered novel forms unlike the monolithic structures that tended to predominate under urban renewal, mixed the land uses that urban renewal sought to segregate, and emphasized the traditional street grid that defined Harlem. Above all, ARCH staff and their community partners embraced what they identified as the quotidian vitality of Harlem, celebrating the neighborhood’s existing urban fabric and the vernacular culture they associated with its blocks. Through words and plans, they offered the possibility that Harlem’s poverty, its literal and figurative isolation from much of New York, could serve not as a liability but as the means through which Harlemites could achieve empowerment and self-determination.
In discerning the meaning and limits of this ideal, I argue, ARCH participated in the broader project of defining the cultural implications of Black Power. While artists, poets, writers, and playwrights involved with the contemporaneous Black Arts Movement argued for the existence and necessity of a “black aesthetic,” the members of ARCH extended this discourse into the realm of the built environment. Their pursuit echoed the culminating chapter of Black Power, in which Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton insisted that political, social, and economic transformation necessitated a “search for new forms.” By the close of the decade, Harlemites had taken strides toward realizing their goal of a community collectively built by and for its low-income residents. Yet over time, as with the revolutionary aspirations of Black Power itself, ARCH’s experiments would prove inspirational as ideals, but difficult to fully attain in reality.
Brutalism and Black Power: A Controversial Legacy of Heritage and Design Amber N. Wiley, Tulane University
A 1963 editorial on urban schools in Architectural Forum praised development of new schools that resembled “fortresses of the mind, rather than penitentiaries of the spirit.” The Educational Facilities Laboratory produced The Schools and Urban Renewal: A Case Study from New Haven (1964) that promoted school construction as a method of community informed renewal in contrast to the downtown civic plans of the 1950s. Educational policy expert Roald Campbell edited a publication of essays entitled Education and the Urban Renaissance (1968) that moved the conversation forward to engage Model Cities legislation.
These design and urban renewal ideas became reality with the construction of Brutalist- inspired schools in the historical milieu of post-1968 riot Washington, D.C. Black architects, planners, and politicians in the city collaborated after the 1968 riots in the advent of Home Rule and rallied to have meaningful input and a positive impact on the restoration of Washington’s riot-torn neighborhoods. These designers increasingly engaged Black Power rhetoric while the schools embraced an Afrocentric approach to student self-realization. The post-riot building campaigns reflected new power dynamics in community politics and urban renewal that emphasized a progressive agenda for education reform.
More remarkable than the avant-garde design of the schools, which truly embodied the idea “fortresses of the mind,” is the narrative of failure that shrouds bright intentions for reform that made Washington a symbol of progressive community engagement, educational pedagogy,
99 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 and monumental design. For example, Howard D. Woodson High School in Washington was demolished after serving its community for 36 years. A student quoted in the Washington City Paper characterized the “Tower of Power” as just “a tower. There ain’t no power.” This criticism reflects the idea that the school building was not only a symbol of educational advancement, but served the larger purpose of urban iconography directly tied to the self-image of its surrounding neighborhood. All too often, the fortified nature of new school design in Washington revealed a post-riot anxiety through materials and massing. The exterior of these schools were direct commentaries on the nature of life on the street and growing fear of the potential violence of urban youth. This type of construction brought about a new definition of monumental architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s that did not transcend the aesthetic ethos of the era.
Session E7: British Colonial Town Planning Chair: Stefan Kipfer, York University Comment: Audience
Nigeria, Colonial Rule and the Future of the African City Geoffrey I. Nwaka, Abia State University, Uturu, Nigeria
Every aspect of the Nigerian/African city today bears the imprint of colonial rule, and the marks and scars of neglect at the formative stages in the colonial period. Although many of the cities in Nigeria owe their growth largely to the activities generated by European presence, British colonial officials tended to see the cities as an unfortunate by-product of its activities which had to be firmly contained in order to avoid political subversion and social disorganization. Towns were not conceived as centers of industrial production or self- sustaining growth as in the metropolitan country, but rather as small enclaves for administration, transportation and colonial trade. The policies and institutions for urban development, - for land use control, planning, etc were very restrictive and discriminatory. As a result the rapid urban expansion of the post-colonial period has quickly overtaken and overwhelmed the local institutions and capacity to cope with the crisis of inadequate shelter and services, unemployment and the worsening deterioration of the urban environment. Unfortunately, successive post-colonial administrations have been slow to rethink the colonial city and colonial planning. Instead Government officials and planners tend to see slums and irregular settlements as evidence of the failure of official policy, and therefore something to be removed. But current research suggests that the path to urban peace and sustainability in Africa lies in building more inclusive and socially equitable cities, “where everybody, regardless of their economic means, gender, age, ethnic origin or religion are enabled and empowered to participate productively in the social, economic and political opportunities that cities offer”.
The central argument of the paper is that human development and welfare ought to be at the centre of the concern for sustainable urbanization in Africa, and that greater priority should be given to the health and development concerns of the poor. The human development approach calls for rethinking and broadening the narrow technical focus of conventional town planning and urban management in order to incorporate the principles of
100 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 urban health and sustainability embodied in the Habitat Agenda, ILO’s Decent Work Agenda, WHO’s Healthy Cities programme, and other recent global initiatives which provide guidance on how to make cities everywhere more inclusive and socially sustainable. The paper concludes with some general reflections on the future of the African city, what form it will take, and how to bring about the changes needed to make these cities healthier, more productive, equitable and harmonious, and better able to serve people’s needs.
Imagining Jerusalem: 1918-1948: The Relevance of British Town Plans Noah Hysler Rubin, Bezaelel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel
The paper discusses town planning in Jerusalem during the time of the British Mandate (1918-1948). In thirty years of military and civil rule, five British town planners prepared five master plans which reflected the goals of the British regarding Jerusalem and Palestine as a whole. To date, canonical writings of planning history in Israel fail to examine the way these imperial plans were received and contested by the actual population of Palestine and the subaltern geographies which they represent. At the time, both Arab and Jewish societies were forming new national identities and shaping their own ideas and concepts regarding the Holy City and future capital of the independent state of Israel; these were reflected in the planning discourse and affected the outcome of the local colonial planning practice.
The presentation will draw on previous research regarding the early plans of William McLean, Charles Robert Ashbee and Patrick Geddes, which presented theoretical ideas of early town planning and today considered somewhat romantic. The presentation will also introduce new research regarding the work of Clifford Holiday and Henry Kendall, the more practical planners whose plans for the city reflected the disciplinary amalgamation of a technical and practical new practice of planning. The research relies greatly on small and alternative archives, as well as on archival material so far overlooked, in search for hidden- away stories of planning and resistance. These stories present an alternative imagination of Jerusalem, its spatial practices and its planned future.
From the West Indies to India: Surveyor’s Agency, Professionalization, and the Global Diffusion of Regional Plans in the British Empire, 1756-1784 Benjamin Sacks, Princeton University
Surveyors and urban planners found themselves at the very heart of the British Empire’s eighteenth century economic, political, and social development. In so doing, they experimented with, practiced, and transferred various urban planning designs across a rapidly expanding empire then locked in a global war with France and Spain. This paper will follow the largely uncharted lives of James Simpson and John Byres, two surveyors who operated on the empire’s frontiers between the Seven Years War and the end of the American Revolution.
At the Treaty of Paris (1763) Great Britain obtained Tobago, Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Grenada from France. Collectively known as the Ceded Islands, these West Indian territories held enormous economic potential. In a largely unprecedented move, the Board of Trade and the Treasury abandoned existing ad-hoc, or Raubwirtschaft economic policies in an experimental attempt to plan the islands’ long-term sustainable socioeconomic and military development. Far
101 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 from passive functionaries, Simpson and Byres intricately organized each colony’s landscape around a framework they believed would be most beneficial to sugar cultivation, urban development, slave control, and imperial authority. Operating in an often weakly administered “middle ground” where British, French, and indigenous groups lived uneasily alongside one another, the surveyors enjoyed remarkable flexibility to exercise their own judgment, authority, and test panoptic settlement, garrison, and plantation plans along bays and different landscapes in the years before the formal organization of the Ordnance Survey. Although Simpson and Byres’ efforts successfully organized much of the islands’ long-term infrastructure, their plans also led to the rise and fall of Saint Vincent’s governor and the temporary restoration of French rule.
The Ceded Islands experience was an important moment in the professionalization of surveyors as a valuable class within the British Empire, and provided significant, intimate insight into the careful political and social schemes they employed to gain patronage, wealth, and respect. Both surveyors transferred the planning concepts, models, and strategies they gained elsewhere in the British Empire. Simpson conveyed his knowledge into becoming a successful plantation owner. Byres embarked on an international journey, employing the strategic planning ideas, skills, and designs he had perfected in the West Indies in aiding the fortress of Gibraltar, and in the design of forts, defenses, and settlements at Coimbatore, Madurai, and Polygautcherry (Palakkad) after the Second Mysore War.
Session E8: What Was Redevelopment in California? Chair: Eric Avila, UCLA Comment: Eric Avila, UCLA
From Adversary to Ally: The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and Neighborhood-Based Planning Ocean Howell, University of Oregon
On March 27, 1967 residents of San Francisco's Mission District packed the chambers of the Board of Supervisors until there was standing room only. Another 300 residents were right outside, picketing. The Supervisors were about to vote on whether to apply for federal funding for an urban renewal project in the Mission. Responding to overwhelming displays of community resistance, the Supervisors voted 6 to 5 against the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA)-backed application. Key organizers of the neighborhood campaign celebrated "having beaten the 'federal bulldozer.'" In the years that followed, the neighborhood groups were able to gain control of Great Society funds, through the Model Cities program, and to establish themselves as the legitimate planning authorities within the space of their own neighborhood. This paper reconsiders the encounter between the SFRA and the multiethnic resident coalitions that formed in the Mission District during the 1960s. The story has received some attention in the scholarly literature, most notably in Manuel Castells's The City and the Grassroots (1983). Castells's work is based almost exclusively on interviews with members of the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO), and tells the story of a neighborhood that fended off the federal bulldozer, and wrested power from the municipality. However, an analysis of the plans, reports, internal correspondence, and other documents produced by the SFRA, the
102 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation, the Human Rights Commission, the Economic Opportunity Council, and City Hall from 1960-1973 all tell a very different story. The SFRA had never planned to clear the Mission District, as it had done in the primarily African American Fillmore neighborhood. Rather, the SFRA planned primarily a rehabilitation program for the Mission. Moreover, the MCO's original position was to support urban renewal because they accepted the SFRA's analysis that the neighborhood was indeed in need of rehabilitation. The MCO also accepted the SFRA's analysis that the urban renewal program was the best available tool to mitigate the real estate speculation that would inevitably accompany the construction of two rapid transit stations that were already planned for the neighborhood. In other words, the neighborhood groups believed that urban renewal provided the best tool to maintain low income housing. The resident groups did have conditions, however; they supported urban renewal provided the neighborhood could set priorities and could wield a veto over any aspect of the plan. In the end, the neighborhood opposed the SFRA's initial application only because the city was unable, under federal law, to grant veto power. However, once the MCO gained control over planning through Model Cities, it acted on all of the SFRA's original recommendations, with the exception of two large clearances around the transit stations. The MCO also collaborated directly with the SFRA to create new public housing and to clear many derelict structures in the Mission. By 1970, the neighborhood found itself vigorously defending the SFRA against budget cutbacks. So while the Mission District is often cited as an example of a neighborhood that beat urban renewal, it is much better understood as an example of a neighborhood that gained control over urban renewal.
Competing Visions of Development and Redevelopment in a Majority-Minority Suburban City Michael Kahan, Stanford University
East Palo Alto is a small, low-income, majority-minority suburban city on the San Francisco peninsula. Having only incorporated in 1983, East Palo Alto lacked the tax base to support a police force adequate to a wave of violent crime that swept through the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When the city found itself leading the nation in homicides per capita in 1992, its leadership was prompted to redevelop several major parcels of land in order to improve the tax base. Previous redevelopment efforts had yielded few results, because of opposition both within the community and outside. The new efforts, however, commanded a wider consensus, and resulted in the construction of a major new shopping center where an apartment complex and high school had stood, as well as a luxury hotel and office space on the site once occupied by the city’s major commercial strip.
While this appears to be a familiar story—local neighborhood retail and residential uses brushed aside by global corporations taking advantage of taxpayer-subsidized land purchases—it differs from the conventional script in several notable ways. First, because the city was majority- minority, the racial politics of redevelopment were different. Instead of a white-led government confronting a neighborhood of color, as in San Francisco’s Fillmore, here elected officials of color led the redevelopment agency. Second, East Palo Alto had a history of political activism that had already produced an alternative vision for community development. A grassroots organization called the East Palo Alto Historical and Agricultural Society (EPA HAS) had conceived and published a sophisticated development plan for one of the city’s neighborhoods, focusing on preserving the city’s historic agricultural character. Third, East Palo
103 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Alto was not a central city but a suburb, with all of the characteristics of suburban California government, including non-partisan elections and a city manager form of government. This paper will present redevelopment in the unfamiliar political and social context of a black and Latino suburb. And underneath the apparent consensus backing redevelopment, this paper will present a contest between competing visions: a creative, grassroots vision emphasizing the city’s agricultural past, and a more conventional vision pointing toward the city’s corporatized, globalized future.
From Eradicating Blight to Restoring Community: Redevelopment in West Oakland, CA James Buckley, UC Berkeley In 1959, the City of Oakland adopted a General Neighborhood Renewal Plan for West Oakland, creating a 250-block redevelopment area in a predominantly African-American neighborhood near the city’s maritime and rail port. Focused on addressing perceived issues of “blight” in the target area, the Oakland Redevelopment Agency (ORA) laid out plans to scrape and rebuild much of the community’s 19th century building fabric for a combination of new industrial uses and mixed residential development. Robert Self and Donna Murch have chronicled the sometimes violent reactions to these plans by the Black Panthers and other local activists. These community protests succeeded in pushing the ORA to pursue more inclusive projects, like the Acorn Apartments: 700 units of new, modernist apartments covering three city blocks, constructed by a partnership of black and labor union investors.
From this contentious start, redevelopment activity in West Oakland settled into a more mundane effort to maintain and build affordable housing units to serve the area’s significant low- and moderate-income population. Over time, the activities of the ORA and its successors resulted in the construction of more than a thousand units of affordable housing in the West Oakland renewal area and thousands more throughout the city. The Acorn Apartments served again as a prime example of the city’s evolving redevelopment approach in the late 1990s, when it lay in disrepair, foreclosed on by its federal financing agency and celebrated by gangsta rappers as a center of the West Coast drug trade. A new focus on economic uplift and resident services in the rescue of this significant complex exemplified a shift in the purpose of redevelopment from blight eradication towards a fuller concept of community development.
Governor Jerry Brown’s closure of California’s redevelopment program in 2011 marks this as an appropriate time to ask where the state’s program succeeded and failed over the last half century. Using the Acorn Apartments as a lead example, this paper examines the role of redevelopment in one of the key types of communities for which it was originally intended: minority-dominated industrial districts in need of assistance. What difference did Oakland’s redevelopment program make here? What does West Oakland’s history of redevelopment tell us about this type of approach and, as advocates push for a new type of redevelopment activity in the state, what are its possibilities in a community like Oakland in a new century?
Session E9: Everyday Urbanism: Seeing and Making the City Co-Chair: Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley Co-Chair: Ursula Lang, University of Minnesota Comment: Paul Hess, University of Toronto
104 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
The Garage Sale as Everyday Practice and Transformative Urbanism Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley
One of the most ubiquitous yet little studied dimensions of suburban life is the garage sale. Although there are more than 10 million garage sales in the US every year, with more than a billion dollars in revenue, garage sales are economically invisible, taking place outside of and unrecorded by official economic statistics. Some municipalities attempt to control them, but sellers usually disregard the rules. This presentation will explore the multiple contradictions embedded in the garage sale’s apparently commonplace existence, based on ethnographic research and theoretical analysis. The sale blurs the boundaries between the economic, social, and spatial categories of private and public. It takes place in domestic space, on the front lawn, driveway or porch. Private individuals put the contents of the most private areas of the house, the drawers or closets, on public display. The seller is both a host and a vendor, underlining the personal and social dimensions of this ostensibly commercial activity. The garage sale contains multiple forms of exchange; it participates in a gift economy, with prices so low that they are practically free and free boxes and giveaways. Selling used but still useful items, it also belongs to an economy of recycling. There are also permanent garage sales focused on profits, the equivalent of garage stores. All of these dimensions challenge conventional concepts of urban space. This opens up possibilities for new mixes of functions, spaces, and social interaction that can enrich residential neighborhoods.
Cultivating Everyday Environments Through Yards Ursula Lang, University of Minnesota
Everyday urbanism – with its open disposition to rethinking the roles of expert knowledge, design intentions, and the practice of urban design – throws into question dominant understandings about who builds, inhabits, and experiences the city. This unsettling can be very generative, inviting researchers and practitioners to pay closer attention to how people already see and constantly make the places in which they live. In this paper, I use everyday urbanism as a lens to examine the often overlooked spaces of residential front and back yards Minneapolis, and to see the particular ways they become sites for cultivating everyday neighborhood life. As such, yards offer rich landscapes which are made and experienced with surprising diversity and range. The paper is based on ethnographic and qualitative research with residents in three Minneapolis neighborhoods from 2008-2012. In it, I consider several modes of collective gardening, as well as informal networks of perennial plant sharing and exchange, to investigate ways everyday urbanism is already underway in people’s practices and in experiences with yards. Recent work in critical geography has significantly expanded the ways we might consider the broad range of organisms and materials in urban environments, seeing cities as assemblages of human and ‘more-than-human’ organisms, materials, and histories. Bringing this perspective in conversation with the everyday urbanism approach, I ask how the question of who (and what) is an everyday urbanist matters in the context of yards. Furthermore, I examine the range of engagement and linkages to municipal governance through residents’ yard practices and experiences. Municipal environmentalism is increasingly organized around concepts such as sustainability and resilience (with a host of related regulatory and incentive approaches) – in terms beyond the presence or absence of urban green space. At the same time, residents
105 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 experience yard spaces – and the complex assemblage of human-nonhuman relations within them – in terms of highly resolved scales and relations of proximity and adjacency to other yards. This paper discusses some of the distance between these two perspectives on yards, as well as some implications of an everyday urbanist approach that might better see the diversity already within our residential landscapes.
Between Advertisement and Community Opposition: Condominium Development in Toronto Ute Lehrer and Emilija Vasic, York University
The contradiction between a policy framework that guides growth, the practices of developers in order to make profits and the different daily habits and expectations of inhabitants is at the core of this paper. The practices of selling places to real estate buyers are both sophisticated and mundane. Advertisement strategies have specialized in producing images of a lifestyle that highlights the extra-ordinary aspects of property, a make believe environment, while the mundane aspects are pushed aside. In this paper, we try to unearth some of the contradictions of the underlying relations that shape places. By looking at the condominium boom in Toronto we will study the relationship between selling an image to one group of citizens while another group contests not so much the images themselves but more so the built realities. We will address questions of power and space, notions of community, and practices of identity formation. The research is based on a multiyear study of the advertisement strategies of condo developments on the one hand and a critical engagement with community resistance against condo development on the other. The paper will look at concrete cases where community groups were formed as a response to development pressures, and how these groups developed their agenda in their fight against the developer, and often also against City Hall. Based on these results it will engage with the question of how the dominant development strategies are contradicting the experiences of everyday urbanism which defines the daily practices of inhabitants.
Session E10: Housing after the Welfare State Chair: Richard Harris, McMaster University Comment: Richard Harris, McMaster University
Gentrification and Government Policy in New York Themis Chronopoulos, University of East Anglia
Most social scientists have rejected the claim that gentrification involves the natural movement of individuals to new neighborhoods and have argued that gentrification is a process usually enabled by government policies. This paper seeks to clarify the relationship between government policy and gentrification in New York City with an emphasis on urban planning. Gentrification in New York City intensified in the post-fiscal crisis period and this was accompanied by a city government that became more intensely interested in the development of low income neighborhoods. However, this did not mean that gentrification and planning always went together. Many of the large-scale planning initiatives of the 1980s and the 1990s occurred in neighborhoods that did not gentrify. It was not until the 2000s that one could identify comprehensive planning initiatives in neighborhoods that were undergoing gentrification.
106 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
The Neighborhood Housing Movement and the Struggle over Low-Income Housing in New York during the 1970s and 1980s Benjamin Holtzman, Brown University
This paper focuses on how New York’s poor and lower classes confronted the crisis of abandonment that gripped the city during the 1970s when extensive disinvestment and population loss left thousands of buildings unused, unoccupied, and often city owned due to non- payment of taxes. Latino, African American and white residents protested the blight these buildings brought to their neighborhoods as well as the hypocrisy of a vast unused built environment in the face of a shortage of affordable housing by directly occupying buildings through homesteading. The homesteading movement advanced the notion that lower income people could themselves solve the problems of desertion and disinvestment by taking over landlord abandoned buildings and turning them into owner-occupied housing cooperatives in the city’s most destitute areas. I argue that homesteading complicates our understanding of homeownership in postwar U.S. history. Historians have mostly depicted homeownership during this period as a middle and upper class phenomenon and largely as part of suburbanization. While accurate, these accounts have neglected not just the expansion of homeownership within the urban core, but also the growing demands for access to homeownership among the country’s poor and lower classes.
I also argue that the success of homesteading came not just from participants’ remarkable resiliency, but also because homesteading’s support broadened to politicians across the political spectrum, though in different ways than foreseen by its initial grassroots advocates. As the 1970s progressed, homesteading came to be embraced by conservative and liberal politicians along a fledgling neoliberal logic about the necessity of decreasing state-supported provisions, rewarding “self help” initiatives of the “worthy” poor, and stabilizing urban unrest through increasing low- income homeownership. Homesteading thus reveals a more complicated trajectory of neoliberal ideas and policies than the common depiction of their rise deriving solely from support by conservative elements.
“Circling Up”: The Cohousing Solution to the Problem of Community in the US Emily Mieras, Stetson University
This paper investigates the practice and discourse of cohousing communities in the contemporary United States. Using my fieldwork in several cohousing communities in the Pacific Northwest, I analyze the cohousing solution to perceived lacks in contemporary American relationships and social structures. I argue that cohousing residents have created a complex concept of “community” that blends components of progress and tradition, and individualism and community-mindedness. Through this balance emerges a version of community that speaks both to American ideals of home ownership and independence and to a more nostalgic longing for the face-to-face communities of earlier eras. These intentional communities also conceptualize and operationalize “community” in ways that reshape—and sometimes affirm—historical understandings of gender roles, class identity, and family life. “Circling Up,” words one resident used to describe cohousing, references practices of wagon trains in the American West and nicely conjures the infusion of traditional--and nostalgic--visions
107 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 of community practice as solutions to modern-day challenges. Cohousing communities like Puget Ridge in Seattle (completed in 1994), Higher Ground in Bend, Oregon (1994), and Cascadia Commons in Portland, Oregon (2000) have multiplied since the early 1990s, so that today, more than 200 exist or are forming across the United States. Thusfar, they have received limited scholarly attention.
Cohousers seek a middle ground between communalism and individualism; retaining ownership over their own households and controlling their own incomes, they preserve American ideals of middle and upper-middle-class living while integrating a communal ethic that tempers that individualism. They embrace the technological trappings of modernity but emphasize traditions of face-to-face interaction. An ethic of sharing shapes cohousing practices; residents own major tools in common as well as collectively using and maintaining outdoor spaces and common rooms/kitchens. Residents also make decisions by consensus. Making neighbors a metaphorical family, creating community-sustaining structures, and fostering a sense of place are crucial components in cohousers’ community-building process, in spatial arrangements and social practices. This paper analyzes the community-building mission of cohousing through residents’ own accounts of their goals and experiences and through the cohousing movement’s publications and on-line presentation of its mission. These sources allow me to goals and ideals with evidence from lived experience. Understanding the public discourse surrounding cohousing helps frame the movement as a constructed response to perceptions of broader American social patterns and illuminates the ways in which this discourse challenges and sometimes reproduces broader understandings of community (such as inclusion/exclusion), family, and social good.
Session E11: Roundtable: New Directions in Publishing Moderator: Marta Gutman, City College of New York Comment: Audience
The digital revolution is rapidly and irreversibly transforming the ecosystem of publishing. The ability to disseminate books and articles not only in traditional print formats but also on multiple electronic platforms offers exciting opportunities for scholars, ranging from open peer review processes to multimedia presentations to new collaborative frameworks to dramatically expanded audiences and distribution networks. How are journals and scholars navigating the radical changes now underway? How are academic institutions and scholarly societies adapting their practices? How are scholars deploying new phenomena like social media? What new forms of research collaboration are emerging? How are the powerful feedback loops of the Internet influencing discourse? Is academic publishing financially sustainable? What is the potential for broader public reach? Panelists will explore these questions and more in a roundtable discussion that will quickly open up to audience participation.
Nancy Levinson, Places
Marta Gutman, Buildings and Landscapes
Jonathan Massey, Aggregate
108 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Susanne Schindler, Candide
STUDENT POSTER EXHIBIT Chair: J. Mark Souther, Cleveland State University
Salvaging Salmon: The Central Valley Project and the Conservation Movement Anna Blumstein, Iowa State University
A History of Transportation and Land Use Change in Cincinnati Adam Hartke and Ana Gisele Ozaki, University of Cincinnati
Five Tries: A Rediscovered History of Gulfport, Mississippi Zachary E. Kenitzer, Ohio State University
The History of Planning in the American West Jennifer Shelby, Boise State University
The Hidden Planners: Street Vendors and the Social Production of Public Space in Hanoi, Vietnam Linh Tong, Bryn Mawr College
PAPER SESSION F
Session F1: Getting Published Sponsored by Sage Publications and Taylor & Francis
This session is proposed as a workshop on getting published in an urban historical journal. Each editor will talk for ten minutes each, on the following topics: a brief profile of the journal; editorial criteria for the journal and how to write an article addressing those criteria; the review process; revising and resubmitting; and how graduate students and junior scholars can become involved in the profession through journals besides publishing articles.
Following these brief presentations, we will open the session to comments and questions from the audience. We expect that graduate students and junior faculty in particular will be attracted to this session.
David Goldfield, UNC Charlotte, Editor, Journal of Urban History (Sage Publishers)
Carola Hein, Bryn Mawr College, Editor for Americas, Planning Perspectives (Taylor & Francis)
Christopher Silver, University of Florida, Editor, Journal of Planning History (Sage Publishers)
109 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Robert Lewis, University of Toronto, North American Editor, Urban History (Cambridge University Press)
Session F2: Rethinking the 1970s: New Narratives of Urban “Crisis” Chair: Amanda Seligman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Comment: Amanda Seligman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Tax Securitization and the Persistence of Urban Blight Andrew Kahrl, Marquette University
In 2006, the pastor of the South Hills Baptist Church in the Beltzhoover neighborhood of Pittsburgh attempted to buy an adjoining, abandoned property overgrown with weeds and a haven for drug users. The sellers' asking price: an outrageous $15,000. Like numerous vacant lots across urban America, this property's unpaid property taxes had been bought, securitized, and sold on Wall Street by MBIA Inc., one of the nation's largest tax lien buyers. Beginning in the early 1990s, revenue-starved cities began the practice of selling unpaid property taxes in bulk to private tax collection agencies, which, in exchange for a lump sum payment, gained possession of the right to collect on others' debts to the state. With these agencies' aggressive collection tactics and ability to charge exorbitant interest fees, tax liens became seen as a lucrative investment strategy, netting an estimated 44% annual profit margin at the height of the housing bubble. In Pittsburgh alone, MBIA held by the mid 2000s liens on 8 percent of the city's total real estate. But as it became the darling of Wall Street, tax lien securitization contributed, in blatant and insidious ways, to the persistence of poverty and blight in America's inner cities. As tax debts became bundled with other "toxic" assets, the property's worth became tied to its debts, ones which collectors had no hope of obtaining, but whose presence on the books helped to sustain the fiction of MBIA and other companies' financial statements. As a result, holders of tax liens had absolutely no interest in property maintenance, and an interest in not selling any of its properties at market value. Here, in America's most depressed urban neighborhoods, we uncover some of the collateral damage of the risky, exploitative, and unsustainable practices of the financial sector in the years prior to the 2008 crash, and gain a new perspective on the forces that frustrated attempts by local activists and urban reformers to revitalize America's cities. This paper will trace the origins and development of a speculative market in tax liens, its ties to Wall Streets, and its effects on the cities where it did business. It will examine social and structural changes to American cities in the 1970s that contributed to the emergence of movements for progressive reform to property tax policy and administration, and draw connections between the tax revolts of the late 1970s, the resultant crisis of urban finance, and the rise of a speculative market in tax liens from the 1980s to the present.
The Lure of Decay in Seventies New York Brian Tochterman, Northland College
This paper examines how, despite the aura of decline and despair, New York City remained an attractive destination to certain groups and subcultures through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. For example, as commentators chronicled New York City’s fall, the image of the
110 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
“city in crisis” lured intrepid young adults from all over the country searching for an alternative to the staid, oppressive conformity of suburban and small-town life. For them New York City was a site of opportunity, cheap rents, abandoned lofts, squatter cooperatives, and urban homesteading programs. In this milieu, there is an explosion of culture: the emergence of city- centric New Wave music on the Bowery and hip-hop in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the formation of the graffiti and the downtown art scenes, the flowering – at least in the city – of feminist, black, and queer liberation, and the growth of community-based development organizations working to salvage neighborhoods nearly destroyed by urban renewal and the decline of the welfare state. I show how these appropriated certain neighborhoods in New York, and, for a moment, rendered the collective, democratic, fun city seemed a real possibility. At the same time, I briefly conclude with the policy and planning implications of this moment: loft gentrification, neighborhood branding, and, in general, the neoliberal appropriation of the “downtown” phenomenon.
There Grows the Neighborhood: Community Gardening in 1970s-Era Milwaukee Michael Carriere, Milwaukee School of Engineering
Milwaukee has a long history of community gardening efforts, from World War I and II- era victory gardens to a neighborhood-focused social movement that blossomed in the face of urban fiscal collapse during the 1970s and 80s. These gardens came in a variety of forms and often expressed the racial, ethnic, and cultural characteristics of Milwaukee’s diverse neighborhoods. “Reading” these spaces provides an avenue to better understand the geography of Milwaukee and showcase how the city was actually lived and engaged with during an era often associated with a lack of individual agency in America’s urban centers. As one might expect, such gardens illustrate the complex and often contested relationships city dwellers have had with government, private property, and urban political economy.
Playing integral roles in many of these efforts were a host of federal, state, and local political, educational, and religious institutions. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the University of Wisconsin Extension (UWEX) program, and a myriad of city governmental agencies all provided the knowledge, space, and funding necessary for community gardening to gain prominence in Milwaukee. By the late 1970s, city-wide programs like “Shoots ‘n’ Roots,” an inner-city gardening program funded by the USDA and administered by UWEX representatives with the assistance of city government officials, were providing the model of institutional partnership that allowed thousands of low-income Milwaukeeans to grow their own food on previously vacant land. This paper examines the history of Shoots ‘n’ Roots throughout the 1970s, paying close attention to the ways that the program offered an alternative model of urban redevelopment – a model that helped set the stage for Milwaukee’s emergence as an urban agriculture pioneer in the twenty-first century.
Session F3: Scholarship Blogging: What? Why? Chair: Dean Saitta, University of Denver Comment: Anabel Quan-Haase, University of Western Ontario
Pierre Clavel, Cornell University, www.progressivecities.org
111 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Our website is “Progressive Cities and Neighborhood Planning” www.progressivecities.org done in WordPress which has a blog that we use to write about the main content which appears on 12 or so static pages. The purpose has been to communicate with other scholars and community participants including about a parallel collection of the same name held in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library. Since RMC is beginning to experiment posting the collections’ contents on E-Commons and perhaps other venues, we expect to initiate additional activity related to the site and blog.
The substance of the collection and website is the experience of social change oriented activists who have gotten elected, appointed or staff positions in city governments, and the related and sometimes connected experiences of those engaged in neighborhood planning efforts, usually but not always outside of city hall but often focused on particular city policies. Represented cities include Burlington, VT, Berkeley and Santa Monica, CA, Hartford, Cleveland, Chicago and Boston. The “neighborhood planning” materials reflect the closure of public housing in Memphis, neighborhood improvements in East St. Louis; and local food development and low income housing in Youngstown Ohio. Media include citizen initiated and city plans, oral history recordings and transcripts, documents and personal correspondence and notes. These go back to the 1960s and 1970s, with some coverage of recent years. We are now beginning an effort to contact and collect documents from additional cities and organizations, as well as personal collections.
Our goal is to engage scholars and activists documenting and learning from experiences like these, and the website and blog – along with the Cornell Library facilities and expertise – are to be key devices to make this happen. At the roundtable we can offer both substance and process experience with the site since its beginning in 2006 including interacting with the Library, creating citizen committees around local libraries, and ways of engaging scholars and activists in the project.
Christopher Leo, University of Winnipeg, www.christopherleo.com
My academic blog consists of two parts:
• Short articles that deal with research findings and commentary on those articles. • A column entitled The Passing Scene, containing short entries about interesting material I encounter daily in my research, and links to that material.
I argue that blogs containing serious academic findings or commentary should be formally recognized as an important way of making academic findings available to a wider readership, both as a public service and to help our fellow citizens see the social value of academic research. Following are examples of material from my blog that can serve these purposes:
• A 2007 blog entry documented the techniques a developer used to get city council to agree to substantial and ultimately unjustifiable government subsidies for a major downtown development. Such techniques are widely used, and it is important for
112 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
participants in or observers of local politics understand them.
• Another blog entry showed how city council was misled into agreeing to a bridge project that turned out to be far more expensive than promised.
• In a comparative study of housing and homelessness in three Canadian cities, my research assistants and I showed why a federal government program that made sense in Vancouver was ill suited to Winnipeg and Saint John, New Brunswick, and what that, in turn, teaches us about differences among cities.
I have used both a longer format illustrated in the links above, and a shorter one, examples of which can be found by scanning the material immediately accessible at christopherleo.com.
Kenneth Fox, Attorney, Independent Scholar, www.longrunalldead.com
My blog is under development in conjunction with my current research on American sociology from the 1930s to the 1980s, with a prominent focus on theorizing social structure, urban structure and urban development. A theme of this project is that American sociology has been in turmoil since the 1980s about theory, particularly questions of how theory relates to activism by theorists and researchers. An objective for the blog is to interact with current activists and researchers in dialogue about theory and social and urban structure. As an example, beginning in the 1950s there has been intense interaction of this sort about delinquency which attempted to test the capacity of sociological theories to explain delinquency rates and successes and failures of policies and programs.
LaDale Winling, Virginia Tech, www.urbanoasis.org
Session F5: Exploring Toronto’s Evolving Morphology from the Central City and Regional Perspectives Chair: Paul Hess, University of Toronto Comment: Annabel Vaughan, Director of the Centre for City Ecology in Toronto
Modern Planning and Regional Expansion: Neighbourhood Morphology and the Suburban High-Rise Paul Hess and Graeme Stewart, ERA Architects, University of Toronto
Toronto's suburban form is unique. In contrast to the general experience of the North American City, Toronto's legacy of outward growth incorporated large numbers of high-density multiple dwellings, which, by the mid-1960’s comprised more than half the production of new housing. Shaped by a new regional planning body during the period of rapid post-war growth, Toronto’s suburban areas contain some 2,000 high-rise apartment buildings, organized into several hundred distinct clusters that, together, comprise a grand experiment in modern planning.
The inclusion of such large numbers of mostly privately developed and owned apartment blocks within a larger suburban fabric of low-rise bungalows, should be seen as a hybrid
113 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 suburban form that relates to both the modernist experiments in mass housing by European welfare state, and the large-scale private development of single-family subdivisions in the United States. The result, however, is neither European nor American, but is a distinctive morphology in its own right.
This paper, proposed as part of a larger session examining the evolving morphology and public planning in Toronto, will examine a specific example of Toronto’s hybrid suburban form named “the Peanut,” a community of 80,000 inhabitants developed at the fringes of Toronto in the 1960s. Privately developed under regional and local planning regulations, the area consists of a massive high-rise housing cluster surrounding shared community facilities and ringed by a series of neighbourhood units with bungalows organized around public schools.
Building on the research presented in "The Suburban Tower and Toronto's Legacy of Modern Housing" (Docomomo Journal 39), the paper will place the Peanut within the planning principles and private development methodologies that generated Toronto’s early post-War suburbs; their contrast to suburban models typically found elsewhere in North America; their relationship to contemporaneous European high-rise satellite centres such as Frankurt’s Nordweststadt; and finally explore the ability of this modern legacy to adapt to contemporary city building paradigms. It will explore how the modern planning framework that resulted in Toronto's high-rise suburbs relate to the resurgence of regional planning occurring at the present time, as well as the interim rejection of regional planning due in part to the public rejection of the tower bock form.
The Morphology of Toronto’s Downtown in Two Parts: Part I - The Simcoe Plans 1793, Their Morphology, and the Creation of Public Space Michael McClelland and Brendan Stewart, ERA Architects
The urban form of what is often referred to as the ‘old’ or ‘pre amalgamation’ City of Toronto evolved from a series of ideal British colonial town plans. Between 1793 and 1796 the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, confirmed that the layout would include a small grouping of ten blocks, the Old Town, and a western expansion, the New Town, surrounded by reserve lands held for public or military purposes. Beyond the reserve lands were 200 acre parcels, called park lots, which were granted to supporters of Simcoe’s plan to create Toronto as the new Capital, and at a further distance were the vast expanse of the farm or township lots. This land use framework, laid out with little regard for natural features, and driven by a colonial agenda aimed at attracting the gentry to settle in the new capital, underpins the logic and morphology of the celebrated urban form of Toronto today.
This paper will explore the development of these early plans, showing how their ideal form was modified over time. The impact of natural features, including the harbor and numerous creek beds, and the impact of investment, including the development of the reserve lands and the subdivision of the park lots, significantly affected the plan and created both the basic grid pattern of the city and many of the city’s significant public spaces.
This paper is intended to build on a body of research looking at the comparative effect of block and lot size and pattern on the resultant evolution of city form and local historical
114 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 understanding of the relationship between the original Simcoe plans and unique Toronto building and open space typologies and morphologies.
The Morphology of Toronto’s Downtown in Two Parts: Part II - The Civic Improvements of 1911, Their Morphology, and the Creation of Public Space Michael McClelland and Brendan Stewart, ERA Architects
In 1911 the Civic Improvement Committee for the City of Toronto proposed significant improvements to the existing grid pattern of the city, including numerous rectifications where the original Simcoe pattern did not function well. The centre-piece of the Committee’s improvements was the creation of a new north-south Beaux Arts avenue which would link proposed locations for a new train station and a new City Hall. It would cut through the large central blocks of Simcoe’s New Town and it was argued that the plan would create new street frontage and open up ‘hidden and comparatively useless property’ from the interior of these large blocks and at the same time create significant new civic space.
In the end the bold new avenue was only partially constructed, but by the mid-twentieth century the city was still actively engaged in attempting to subdivide the large blocks and create this north-south connection. But by this point a great deal had changed. The connection would be underground, commencing the city’s vast network of the PATH system. The built form typology of the blocks, most notably the TD Centre but also the earlier Richmond Adelaide Centre, would radically reinterpret the relation of building and street frontage. And the nature of public space in Toronto, from Nathan Phillips Square to the plazas and shopping concourses in the banking district, would never be the same.
This paper will explore the morphology of the street grid and block pattern and the changed typology of built form to demonstrate both the significant historical layering that exists in the downtown core and the extent to which its transformation has been complete and absolute.
Session F6: Utopia and the City Practical Chair: Daphne Spain, University of Virginia Comment: Daphne Spain, University of Virginia
Agrarianism in the Garden City and City Beautiful Movements: Theoretical Differences and Their Implications Nicole Goss, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Though typically understood as a contemporary issue, the current urban design debates over whether or not agriculture belongs in the city were actually borne of the differing theoretical views towards agrarianism expressed by the City Beautiful and Garden City movements at the turn of the 20th century. However, existing literature does not compare the agrarian attitudes of these movements to one another and therefore fails to recognize their significance in defining methods of urban analysis and reform at that time and since. This paper specifically addresses the importance of agricultural inclusion and exclusion in these two principal turn-of the-twentieth city planning movements, juxtaposed against their other similarities and differences, in order to reveal
115 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 previously unrecognized connections between early agrarian attitudes and those of contemporary urban design. This paper argues agriculture offers an insight into these movements and urban design as a whole. In doing so, it redefines the neglected correlations between the urbanized and the agrarian to shed new light on urban design methodologies.
From “City Beautiful” to “City Practical”: Boosterism, Reform, and Urban Design in Minneapolis, 1880-1920 Shannon E. Murray, University of Calgary
In the 1870s, Minneapolis was a small milling outpost on the Mississippi River. Its city founders, desperate to market the settlement as civilized and brimming with potential, commissioned Horace Cleveland to design a master plan that would make it appealing for capital investment and settlers. Boosters used Cleveland’s plan to pitch Minneapolis as a ‘model metropolis’, a city that would strike an ideal balance between nature and urbanity and avoid the congestion or dilapidation of cities like Chicago and New York. Thirty years later, Minneapolis had matured: the economy flourished, the population boomed, and consequently, infrastructure was overwhelmed. Urbanization was a double-edged sword for making Minneapolis marketable. While it represented an accumulation of capital and citizens, it was accompanied by overcrowding, decay, and slums – often referred to as ‘blight’ – that made the city unattractive. Social reformers and civic leaders were anxious to address growing ‘blighted’ areas, and both groups believed in planning and design as panacea for these issues.
Feeling that the physical and social health of Minneapolis was at stake, civic leaders and social reformers worked in concert to improve public space and “redeem…blighted district[s].” Civic leaders, concerned with encouraging growth and development, wanted to address dilapidation before it cost the young metropolis capital investments or settlers. Reformers, adherents of environmental determinism, believed that with clean homes and access to appropriate consumer outlets and parks with programmed recreation areas, Minneapolis' working-class and immigrant populations would adopt middle-class American customs.
Studies of social reform during the Progressive Era are many, but few consider how space, planning, and design factored into reform. This paper will assess the relationship between city actors’ beliefs in environmental determinism and their attempts to use city planning and design as a means to address the consequences of urbanization. Class and ethnic biases are clear in the rhetoric reformers and civic leaders employed to describe their work; they intended to use urban space as a tool to engender certain behaviors and encourage the adoption of middle-class American conventions. This paper will also examine the economic and aesthetic considerations social reformers and civic leaders used when promoting city planning and urban design as ways to combat the ills of urbanity and build a healthy environment, constructing a “city beautiful” as well as a “city practical.”
Green and Modern: Planning Mexico City, 1900-1940 Alfonso Valenzuela-Aguilera, University of Lisbon
During the early decades of the twentieth century, a group of visionary planners undertook the physical transformation of Mexico City reinterpreting concepts from Ebenezer
116 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Howard’s Garden Cities, Jean Claude Forestier’s Systèmes de parcs, to Patrick Geddes’ Regional Planning in order to provide green public spaces and comprehensibly enhance the quality of life in the city. The transformation of the concept of nature within the twentieth century increasingly evolved with the Científicos, linking the “greening” of the city with the aspirations to modernize infrastructures under health concerns. Miguel Angel de Quevedo, Carlos Contreras and Jose Luis Cuevas Pietrasanta set the urban planning framework addressing social, functional and environmental issues in this period, after which industrialization policies would radically transform urban planning into an instrument to achieve economic development rather than a tool to extend welfare. Although Mexico City has always strived to embrace modernity as a recurrent aspiration over the centuries, the perception of the urban environment has changed according to ideal views of social order, material and cultural progress and the role of the city within the nation-building project. However, the importance of key planners of that period and the breadth of their thought on the physical development of Mexico City has been overlooked as well as the major sources where they drew their insights and concepts.
It is interesting to note that Quevedo’s vision of modernity was closely linked to the conservation of nature since it provided the environmental quality of metropolitan grandeur. He consistently advocated for environmental awareness and was Mexico’s foremost ecologist even if the term did not existed as such when he started his public service at the turn of the twentieth century. Ever since urban “modernity” was imported from industrialized countries in the late 19th century, the idea of technological progress has been viewed as the only way to achieve development in emerging economies. In addition, the idea of establishing zoning regulations –originally conceived to improve the sanitarian and functional features of the city- developed into an instrument to institutionalize and further the existing disparities within the urban fabric. Instead of becoming an instrument for social redistribution and rational allocation of resources, planning undertook a pretended “technical” stance within a field clearly immersed in political, economic and social values and perspectives. Finally, a comprehensive approach to planning may require a second thought on social welfare and redistribution, in which planning can be used as an instrument to include, integrate, redistribute and better allocate the benefits –such as public spaces- for the entire city.
Green public spaces played a substantial role in the transformation of Mexico City in the early decades of the twentieth century since the key planners envisioned nature as an instrument to achieve modernity. Even when the notion of progress changed over the century, Mexico City’s planning always maintained a sprit of innovation and change. However, Quevedo, Contreras and Cuevas Pietrasanta’s visions of the city tried to push the limits of planning in order to integrate the urban fabric with nature. Even when structural conditions of the model of growth prevented these key planners’ ambitions to allocate and better distribute resources to the city as a whole, their vision will remain as a turning point for Mexican modern planning for the years to come.
Session F7: Region and Regionalism in Planning Chair: Mark Rose, Florida Atlantic University
117 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Comment: Martin Horak, University of Western Ontario
The Planning History and Politics of Portland Metropolitan Area’s Original Urban Growth Boundary Sy Adler, Portland State University
The Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission's (LCDC) approval of an urban growth boundary for the Portland metropolitan area in December 1979 was arguably the most important decision made during the course of implementing Oregon's statewide land use planning program, and also was a signal event in the history of land use planning in the United States.
This paper examines the history of the boundary development and approval process, a highly contentious, complex intergovernmental affair that began to unfold during the latter 1960s. It included federal and state government mandates to plan regionally, and, in Oregon, to comply with the nation’s only set of legally binding statewide land use planning goals, one of which required a regional urban growth boundary in the Portland metropolitan area. The paper highlights the roles and relationships of planners working for government agencies at various levels, elected and appointed officials, land development interests, and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the leading land use watchdog organization in the United States at the time. Regional planners and officials struggled to balance the growth-related aspirations of many local governments and their private sector development allies, demands to preserve rural settlement options, and farmland and environmental protection concerns of state planners and officials, many farmers, and the watchdog. State and regional agency officials also had to protect their fragile organizations against threats to their survival emanating from the state legislature as well as from often-hostile city and county governments. Conflicts played out on the terrain of technical/substantive aspects of plan making, as well as on the terrain of legal/procedural requirements.
The Historical Evolution of Planning and Metropolitan Governance in the Greater Copenhagen Region Daniel Galland, Aalborg University, Denmark
This paper explores the rise and decay of regional planning policies and institutions in the Greater Copenhagen Region (GCR) since the postwar era. The paper’s focus is twofold. First, it develops an understanding regarding the fluctuating planning context in the GCR through an in-depth historical analysis concerned with the spatial representation of ad hoc regional plans. Secondly, it delves into aspects of metropolitan governance in the GCR by addressing questions of spatial selectivity and rescaling.
The GCR is characterized by an extensive planning legacy that dates back to the publication of the "Finger Plan for Greater Copenhagen" (Fingerplan for Storkøbenhavn) in 1947. Partly inspired by the Abercrombie Plan of 1944, the fundamental objective of the Finger Plan has been to concentrate the urban expansion of the metropolis within the spatial region comprised within the "fingers" that were spatially designed, founded and articulated in accordance with a suburban rail network extending along them. While the Finger Plan was
118 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 never formally adopted in the form of legislation, its visual impact and spatial logic have prevailed amongst planners, politicians and the general public since its time of inception to date. In so doing, such plan has been key in the management and implementation of diverse sectoral policies such as urban transport, industrial development, housing and nature preservation, amongst others.
As a result of two reforms of local government structure that brought about relevant political-administrative and territorial reconfigurations all over Denmark in 1970 and 2007, respectively, the institutions in charge of governing the GCR have consequently been subjected to important shifts in terms of planning functions and powers. For example, the Metropolitan Council of Greater Copenhagen (Hovedstadens Udviklingsråd) has been recently abolished and its authority transferred to the Ministry of Environment. Inspired by the 1947 Finger Plan, the Ministry has designed a regulatory directive with the aim to establish an updated framework for the spatial development of the GCR on the basis of an unprecedented “principle of proximity” to suburban rail stations.
In the specific case of the GCR, various state spatial projects and strategies have prompted the emergence, decline or even the resurgence of particular regional planning policies and institutions. In this light, the latest structural reform can be understood as a state spatial project in which the national government has favored a top-down strategy as a measure to regulate the spatial development of the GCR. Also, contrasting with many other cases of metropolitan governance in Europe, or even urban and regional planning and governance in Denmark itself, the recent Finger Plan directive can be understood as a case of re-scaling where the State has been favored at the expense of lower levels of government.
While the upward re-scaling of regional planning in the GCR is reminiscent of the classical problem of fragmentation generated a multilayer structure comprised by a large number of municipal governments contained within the same urban region, such state spatial strategy poses a new challenge for the metropolitan governance as the 34 municipalities that make up the GCR count with little or no intermunicipal cooperation schemes. Similarly, the implementation of the principle of proximity potentially implies that more central municipalities benefit at the expense of more peripheral ones. This scenario represents a new challenge to the Danish regional planning paradigm, which originally encouraged equal territorial development throughout the whole country.
Session F8: Rethinking and Predating Slum Clearance Across Time and Space Chair: David Stradling, University of Cincinnati Comment: David Stradling, University of Cincinnati
Slum Clearance Without the Name: Engineering, Race, and Improvement in Cincinnati, 1849-1870 Henry Binford, Northwestern University
This paper examines the confluence of technological, social, and cultural developments that lead Cincinnati civic leaders to define the city's first "slum." Even before they attached that
119 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 label to the area, influential Cincinnatians came to think of the Deer Creek Valley, on that city's near east side, as both a sanitary nuisance and a social threat. Their hostility was in part racial — the valley housed a mixed community of Irish and African American workers — but it was also related to their growing belief that the valley's geography should be remade to make it a more valuable and efficient part of the larger metropolitan landscape. The blending of ideas about race with ideas about improvement created a justification for an early, controversial, and vexed effort to use public power to transform an urban neighborhood.
From Agents of Urbanization to Agents of Urban Renewal? Railroads and a Reconsideration of the Cleveland Union Terminal, 1919-1935 John McCarthy, Robert Morris University
From 1919 to 1930, thousands of workers built the Cleveland Union Terminal, an enormous new passenger train station at the center of its downtown, and a complex that included the Terminal Tower, which was the second tallest building in the United States at the time of its completion. The event was hailed in the local media as a major step forward for Cleveland, which now had a centerpiece civic structure that was sure to enliven the city, make it more appealing for visitors, and boost civic pride. The two entrepreneurs behind the Union Terminal’s building, the Van Sweringen brothers, were similarly feted as visionary businessmen whose investments would improve the city as a whole. The Union Terminal Project also involved the demolition of well over 2,000 buildings and essentially erased one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, the Haymarket, in the name of progress and modernity.
This paper will narrate the building of the Terminal Tower and the “unbuilding” of the Haymarket neighborhood, and I seek to tell a familiar story from several different vantage points. First, I argue that while the scale of the Union Terminal project was abnormally large for its time, its practical, economic impact was very similar to downtown building projects across early twentieth century urban America. These kinds of projects did not merely strengthen downtowns but they also altered spatial patterns in important ways: from low-income to middle income, industrial to commercial, and even from city resident to suburban and out-of-town commuter. Secondly, the Union Terminal represents an obvious case of intentional slum clearance, with eminent domain used and condemnation proceedings undertaken, but in this case to the benefit of railroads, which essentially acted as facilitators of downtown rebuilding. Using these perspectives on Cleveland’s downtown, I hope to demonstrate that transformation of cities from places of production and industry to centers of consumption and white collar-related services is not confined to the late twentieth century, but rather was a process that unfolded more gradually over a far greater expanse of time, and involved entities (such as railroad interests) rarely considered before.
Progressive Purification: Slum Clearance, Economic Development, and Modernization in American Civic Centers, 1900-1930 John Ritter, New York University
Civic Centers of the City Beautiful era have often been understood to implement what we now call slum clearance in American cities. This paper proposes to document this aspect of civic center planning, and also to show that these projects anticipated other key features
120 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 associated with later urban renewal plans. Case studies highlight how proponents of civic centers in Cleveland, San Francisco, and New York City supported ‘slum clearance’ through the introduction of new ideas about municipal economic development and urban spatial systems, including exclusive use districting and superblock development.
Each of these cities cleared large areas adjacent to existing business districts and redeveloped them with public buildings in the early 20th century. This paper presents the history and character of what was destroyed in each case, within the context of its replacement by modern civic projects. Under this reading, civic leaders and architects in Cleveland razed nearly 16 blocks of its mixed-use ‘tenderloin’ district in order to both erect a civic center on a new superblock and to extend the business district toward Lake Erie. Meanwhile, San Francisco built a new civic complex on blocks assembled to create monumental civic grandeur, but also to rationalize the urban circulation system and to promote growth of the business district on Market Street. And New York consolidated its civic presence on the site of the notorious Five Points neighborhood, promising to both destroy “sordid Chinatown” and to promote the expansion of real estate speculation and economic development in the area.
This paper concludes by suggesting that we might read connections between early civic center projects and post-war urban renewal through the influence of Progressive era planning on the New Deal, the policies of which, in turn, formed the foundation of many post- war urban renewal programs.
Slum Clearance in London and Hamburg: A Structural Comparison from 1875-1914 Dirk Schubert, HafenCity University, Hamburg
In England and Germany the manifestation of a housing problem in the form of slums at the end of the 19th century was no novelty. What was new, though, was the extent and concentration of poverty that had resulted from industrialisation processes, and how the problem was seen and approached. However, the physical characteristics of the slums and redevelopment areas are different in Germany and England. The dominant form of housing in Great Britain, even for lower income groups was the small, two story terraced house (sometimes “back-to- back”), rented or rare owned, often in bad structural condition and overcrowded, whereas in Germany there were normally older buildings from the preindustrial area and later small, overcrowded rented flats (Tenements – “Mietskasernen”) showing a significantly higher density per flat as well as at the urban scale.
Based in research in manifold archives in England and Germany the contribution will focus on a comparative perspective in both countries related to the rapid urbanization process in both countries. The paper is an analysis of how, when and by whom the questions of slum clearance and urban redevelopment have been discussed in this context.
However the fact that England and Germany played the leading roles in the formation of the discipline of town planning can perhaps legitimise the limited scope. The origin of the discipline needs to be observed in light of the specific conditions of urbanisation processes in both countries. But for both counties urbanization had, by the 19th Century, began completely changing spatial patterns in the country, leading to complex new problems in the cities. This
121 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 quantitative process of increased population density in urban areas was coupled with qualitative change as can be observed in the lifestyles originating from cities of the time. This change in urban lifestyle was in turn connected to modernisation processes such as the formation of the class system, increasing bureaucratisation and participation, the growing significance of law and the expansion of mass-communication. The socio-cultural attitudes, disposition, lifestyles, behavioural patterns and disciplinary ways in the cities effected all of society. The effect of increasing urbanisation became apparent not only in new settlement structures but also in new ways of living.
In this context the slums were the most important challenge for reformers and town planners. The empirical study of cities, housing conditions and slums became a new branch of the discipline of town planning. It was marked by a systematic description of social realities with its manifestations of poverty, slum misery, and lack of housing and a variety of ways to improve the conditions.
Session F9: The Real World of Regional Planning: Devising Plans that Conform Chair: Zack Taylor, UTSC Comment: Zack Taylor, UTSC
The Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe: An Overview Darryl Soshycki, Ministry of Infrastructure
The panel organizer has invited a representative of the provincial body responsible for defining and implementing the regional plan for greater Toronto, known as the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, to give an overview of the plan’s elements and progress toward its implementation. This will contextualize the academic research for non-local participants. This will take the form of a visual presentation. No paper will be circulated in advance.
Creating a Plan for Durham Region Melanie Hare, Urban Strategies, Inc.
Municipal Planning Under the Growth Plan John Gladki, Gladki Planning Associates Inc.
Session F10: Constructing and Reconstructing Small American Cities Chair: James Connolly, Ball State University Comment: James Connolly, Ball State University
Holyoke, Massachusetts: A Comprehensively Planned Industrial City (1853) Thomas K. Davis, University of Tennessee
The city of Holyoke, Massachusetts is the subject of this paper because of the intriguing formal characteristics that result from its topographic setting, its unique planning history, and its subsequent architectural development. Holyoke was one of the first comprehensively planned
122 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 industrial cities in America. Its original 1853 plan remains intact today, although suffering from severe deterioration of its fabric.
Holyoke is located on the Connecticut River, north of Springfield, at a 60-foot drop in the river level over a one-mile length. Because of the hydropower potential, a group of Boston mill owners and investors were attracted to the manufacturing possibilities of the river drop, and in 1847 acquired farms and land tracts that are now Holyoke. They intended to create a major mill town community development.
The first goal of the investing group was the construction of a dam at the river and the design of a 4.5-mile long hydropower canal system that would maximize the power potential for manufacturing. The principle for the canal system involves three parallel power canals, each one at a lower level than the previous. Water diverted from the river above the dam rushes from the First Level Canal (highest) along the mill races where it turns water wheels and then flows into the Second Level Canal, which in turn feeds the Third Level Canal. The process of supplying power is repeated as the water drops from the Third Level Canal, through the mills and back into the Connecticut River. The canal system operates intact today, although in most mills, the water wheels have been replaced with turbines that generate electricity.
The form of the city of Holyoke, then, was clearly defined by its topographic features: a major slope running parallel to the First Canal, the curve of the river, and the canal system. The area within the ring of canals is flat, with the exception of a significant ridge, known as Depot Hill. In the design of the city, investors laid out a gridded block organization.
From the start, Holyoke was not planned simply as an industrial center, but as a community industrial in nature. Because textile manufacturing is labor intensive, great care was given to the workers well being and housing. The dominate housing type is perimeter block apartments. Approximately half of the block was left open for light, air, and recreation. Well- constructed masonry buildings provided each apartment with water and sewage systems and sufficient light and air. Density was achieved by building four to five stories. While austere by modern standards, this housing was progressive when compared to the average tenement in New York City at the time.
As a community, Holyoke could boast of an unusually high level of civic amenities and associated social programs: parks, churches, schools, hospitals and stores. The diversity of the Holyoke work force was reflected in the development of ethnically distinct neighborhoods centered around the various churches in the city. A strong sense of ethnic identity and diversity continues today.
At the end of the 19th century, textile manufacturing in the Northeast began an irreversible decline. Holyoke, with its extensive power capabilities, and with easy access to wood pulp, was able to make a transition to paper manufacturing, thereby avoiding the severe economic decline which plagues other Northeastern mill towns. Today, Holyoke is still a major paper manufacturing center. However, in this transition from labor-intensive industry to a largely automated industry, Holyoke has suffered a major population decline.
123 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Holyoke is fortunate in still having a viable and stable economic base in its paper manufacturing industry. Land use over the decades has remained virtually constant, characterized by a ring of industry associated with the canals. The greatest physical and social problem facing the city today is its population decline and the corresponding decline of its housing stock.
Flying in Formation: How Bangor, Maine, Juggled Air Base Closure, Housing Realignment, and Downtown Renewal, 1964-1974 Thomas McCord, University of Maine at Augusta
In the course of one month in late 1964, federal authorities approved a fifty-acre downtown renewal program for Bangor, Maine, and announced plans to close a Strategic Air Command base that covered one tenth of the city. Municipal authorities devoted much of the next ten years to reuse of the base and the downtown. These initiatives were complicated by planners’ uncertainty over the fate of one thousand Air Force housing units in a city of just 38,000 people. This paper argues that the small Northeastern city successfully navigated a myriad of planning problems, but ultimately was beholden to shifting commercial interests in trying to complete its renewal projects. Bangor succeeded in launching a small, vibrant international airport, a public housing authority, and a revived district of primarily single-family homes. But efforts to lure manufacturers to the former air base and plans for downtown retail revival had fallen short by enactment of the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act. Convergence of base reuse, retail renewal, and housing issues in a small city during this period provides a vantage point for assessing the role of individual agency at the municipal level (Bangor was intensely active) and the efficacy of federal prescriptions for urban structure and local needs.
Calvert Town Society, Inc., a Small City Proposed for Southern Maryland Sally Berk with Charles I. Cassell, Independent Scholar
In 1933, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia voiced strong opposition to federal support of a proposed new town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for, what he termed, colored folks; and in the midst of the Depression. The Federal Government, thereupon, considered it prudent to withdraw support for the project.
The project was the brain-child of Albert I Cassell (1895-1969), an African- American architect, one of five children of a Baltimore coal-truck driver and a housewife who took in washing. Although discouraged by his school counselor, as well as his parents, in his goal of attending Cornell’s School of Architecture – being advised, instead, to apply to an historically black university - Cassell moved to Ithaca, repeated his last year of high school, qualified for Cornell, and earned an architecture degree in 1918.
Five years later, two of which he spent as architect for Tuskegee Institute, Cassell was invited to become campus architect for Howard University, charged with preparing a twenty- year expansion plan. He eventually designed nine of the fourteen buildings proposed in that plan, while also maintaining a private practice with commissions that included Morgan State College and Providence Hospital in Baltimore; Union University in Richmond; municipal works in
124 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Washington, DC, and the Federal Government.
Despite such notable success, Cassell continued to experience discrimination both socially and professionally. Incensed that such behavior existed in the capital of a nation founded on equality for all, he determined to create a retreat from such attitudes. Using his own funds, he purchased 500 acres in Calvert County, Maryland upon which to build a town that would be constructed and operated primarily by African-Americans. He paid his architectural staff at Howard University to work after hours designing a community that would include a shopping center, post office, schools, parks, a recreation center, a tobacco and canning industry, an employment center, and accommodation for ocean liners and cargo ships bound for Baltimore.
Cassell secured a commitment from Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, Sr, with whom he had worked at Howard University, for a federal loan of five million dollars and a grant in the same amount. After the funding was defeated in the Senate, Cassell spent his remaining years seeking support to complete the project. On his death bed, his last utterance was, “Let me out of this bed! I have a meeting in Philadelphia tomorrow where I know I can get the money to resume the project.”
Had Cassell realized his vision, would Chesapeake Heights on the Bay have endured? Although residency would not have been restricted to African- Americans, it's highly unlikely that Caucians would have sought to live there. It would have been an extremely homogeneous community. A comparison with similar American enclaves - religious, ethnic, and ideological - should provide some answers as to the viability of Cassell’s dream.
PAPER SESSION G
Session G1: Pedagogy Roundtable: Teaching the Built Environment Outside of the Professional Box Co-Chair: Matthew Lasner, Hunter College Co-Chair: Kenny Cupers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
As it trains a professional lens on the built environment, planning and design education typically emphasizes how rather than why. In prioritizing procedure over understanding, we believe this pedagogical model threatens to downplay complexity and ignore and obscure a panoply of realities, dimensions, and qualities of the built environment. Indeed, in most professional curricula, humanistic inquiry into the built environment is limited to courses in which “history and theory” ultimately serve, as Dell Upton and others have written, to legitimize professional practices and reinforce normative goals.
This roundtable proposes to discuss what approaches and methods from the arts and humanities can be harnessed to place such broad, non-normative inquiry more centrally in professional education in planning and architecture. Our goal is to bring together educators— both as panelists and in the audience—to discuss challenges of, and effective approaches to, this kind of teaching. We are particularly interested in exploring hybrid theory- methods-fieldwork courses that engage the critical capacities of professional students and which challenge
125 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 conventional professional modes and models.
What kinds of courses can encourage students to think about the built environment outside of a professional discourse? How can practices and approaches from the arts and humanities, including (but not limited to) urban photography and digital media, alternative forms of mapping, direct interventions, fieldwork research, oral histories and ethnography, and archival research be harnessed to this end within course and seminar formats in professional programs? What exactly can be gained by teaching the built environment outside the professional box?
Dan Campo, Morgan State University
Dianne Harris, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Eve Blau, Harvard University
Greg Hise, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley
Robert Fishman, University of Michigan
Dolores Hayden, Yale University
Session G2: Civic Design in Global Perspective Chair: Christopher Klemek, George Washington University Comment: Georges Farhat, University of Toronto
The Formation of Qingdao’s Parks During the Colonial Period (1898-1914) Benyan Jiang and Masaki Fujikawa, University of Tsukuba
This paper aims to examine the formation of Qingdao’s parks during 1898-1914 when Qingdao was colonized by Germany. Firstly, the urban planning and construction carried out in Qingdao was analyzed, and then that how were parks planned and formed was stated. It turns out that the German government created various parks during the colonial period by improving the former green spaces, making urban planning and cultivating the forest. The first parks, no matter the original green spaces existed in the former period (1891-1898) or parks planned by Germany, were arranged around government house, temple or church, which explained Chinese and German values for politic and religion. In addition to the parks around the significant facilities, hill top parks, seacoast parks and valley parks were also created along with the forestation activities. Not only was the natural topography of Qingdao was well utilized, the parks, too, got wonderful views. In order to provide a variety of plants, the German government imported various trees from Germany, Japan, America and other countries. And also the colors and ecological habits of those trees were well considered and mixed planted, which formed landscapes of cherry blossoms, black pine and acacia forests. However, all of those parks were placed in the European’s area while none were built
126 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 in the Chinese area at all.
City Designing, The Modern City, and the Philippines, 1898-1916 Ian Morley, Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Treaty of Paris (1898) instigated America’s administration of the Philippines. By 1905 Manila was replanned and Baguio built as expressions of colonial sovereignty, and as symbols of a society disassociating itself from its hitherto ‘uncivilised’ state of existence. While scholars have suggested that the importation of American urban design practice into the Philippines was exclusively tied to the propagation of the City Beautiful Movement, initial research by this author has explicitly linked post-1898 Philippine urban designing to matters of ‘modern civilisation’, ‘cultural progress’, and the promotion of a federal nationhood. Accordingly this paper considers two matters: how the redevelopment of large-sized provincial settlements, e.g. Cebu and Zamboanga (in 1912), alongside the redevelopment of Manila and creation of Baguio promoted a centralised sense of nationhood, and how recourse to civic design helped to express this; the construction of ‘the modern city’ was an articulation of America’s yearning to establish a new culture that purposefully disassociated the Philippines from its Spanish colonial past, and its image as a place inhabited by ‘savages’.
Aligning the importation of modern American urban design with the evolution of Philippine society, the paper therefore ventures to reinterpret city planning alongside education, politics, and economics as social institutions that profoundly affected the evolution of the Philippines. The paper’s findings will deliver insights into the forces that existed during the early years of American rule. By investigating urban design with respect to colonial ideals, social advancement, and the shaping of national identity the work will deepen knowledge of American imperialism and Philippine cities before the passing of the Autonomy Act (1916), i.e. the decree that forged a framework for ‘more autonomous government’ in preparation of the granting of independence by the United States.
The Urbanization of Garden Art, or the Public Squares and Parks of Paris, 1854-71 Gideon Fink Shapiro, University of Pennsylvania
Although the public garden was not invented in Paris, it was in Paris in the nineteenth century that public landscape architecture appeared as a coherent urban system. The new parks and squares built or renovated in Paris during the period of the Second Empire reflect a historic synthesis of pastoral garden art with civic engineering. The garden and the city transformed each other in this synthetic encounter between infrastructure and horticulture. Landscape served as a mythical and material medium through which aesthetic and cultural values were (partially) reconciled with the urban functions of water supply, gas lighting, economic development, and traffic circulation. The task of design was to supply a serviceable kit of parts for the introduction and maintenance of urban landscape—couched of course in terms of “nature” and “taste.”The struggle for reconciliation of these contrasting functions was partly a matter of design and planning, and partly a matter of public use and reception.
In terms of design and planning, the urbanization of garden art was a process entrusted to the engineer J.-C.-A. Alphand, director of parks under the administration of G.-E. Haussmann
127 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 and the Emperor Napoleon III. Alphand and his many collaborators set up industrial-scale greenhouses and nurseries, devised machinery to speed up construction and maintenance, altered the flow of water, and made use of odd parcels leftover from Haussmann’s operations. The naturalistic landscape aesthetic was stretched to its limit and beyond; technological and theatrical elements defined public urban nature as much as horticulture and sophisticated taste. This paper will also, however, look beyond the intentions of the landscape architects and planners to examine alternative accounts of how the new urban green spaces were used and regarded in everyday life. My sources will include Alphand’s Promenades de Paris as well as popular newspapers, journals, guides, paintings, and cartoons. Among the 24 small parks, three medium- size parks and two large bois, I will focus on several sites such as the Square du Temple, the Square des Batignolles, and the Parc Montsouris. I will trace both the continuities and the ruptures with eighteenth-century engineering and garden design tradition in the making of the public works.
Session G3: Making Detroit Chair: Andrew Herscher, University of Michigan Commnet: Andrew Herscher, University of Michigan
Detroit’s Other Industry: Real Estate and the Culture of Elusive Security Michael P. McCulloch, University of Michigan
“Prosperity and real estate activity go hand in hand…the two greatest elements of business life and activity in Detroit today are automobiles and real estate.” -H.T. Clough, executive secretary, Detroit Real Estate Board, 1915
The modern worker’s home made Detroit’s Fordist industrialization possible. During the years 1914-1929, from Ford’s “Five Dollar Day” to the Great Depression, industrialists, real estate developers and workers produced a building boom in housing that reshaped the urban society, creating a class of stable mass-production employees and invested consumers. The real estate economy, in symbiosis with the city’s industrialization, constructed Detroit’s homeowner-urbanism by financing, building and selling tens of thousands of modest homes to workers.
This paper will explore Detroit’s real estate boom as a cultural project, arguing that individual security was its fundamental ideal even among larger scale “community builders” such as B. E. Taylor. As home builders and sellers gained the authority of professionalism in the Model T Era they posited the worker’s home as a safe place to invest and grow a lifetime’s wealth, and as protection from the uncertainties of illness, job loss, and aging. The advertisements and salesman-training records of Detroit Realtors will be used to illustrate the security discourse, its use to entice worker- homebuyers and assuage their fears of mortgage debt, and also its crisis-proneness, being a model of security requiring continuous value-appreciation and uninterrupted employment. Such security proved elusive from the beginning as homeowners faced insecurities brought about by speculation, shifting perceptions of home values, and cyclical economic uncertainty, reaching a crisis point with the worldwide depression of 1929. This research will offer reflections on the fragile promise of real-estate-as-security within
128 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 industrial capitalism by analyzing records of Detroit’s “distressed homeowners” of the 1930’s.
This project suggests a new significance for Detroit’s largely abandoned worker’s houses, often seen as mere “ruins” in the present: they index social contradictions that were built into the structure of the city from the beginning of its automobile-based industrialization. Finally, this paper will suggest historical lessons about the precariousness of working-class homeownership as a social model, badly needed in the wake of the subprime foreclosure epidemic that began in 2008, as workers continue to seek security amid crisis.
Presenting Modernity through the Documentation of Detroit’s Architectural Landscape Virginia B. Price, Historian, Washington, DC
Founded in 1933, the Historic American Buildings Survey was a response to the rapidly changing landscape that saw traditional architectural forms replaced by symbols of modernity and expressions of industrial capitalism. In Detroit, for example, the automobile brought affluence and avant-garde architecture, like the landmark Fisher Building and the Guardian Building of the late 1920s, and its own vernacular, the garage house, linked to poorer occupants in the Home Owners Loan Corporation records of the late 1930s. The presentation of Detroit’s architectural landscape embodies the juxtaposition between ideas of social and material progress ushered in through homeownership and corporate modernism on one hand, and the curation of particular pasts on the other, that characterized cultural modernism. This paper will explore the reach of two federal programs that articulated modernist sensibilities in different ways and analyze how those incongruities shaped the presentation of a modern Detroit.
Car culture defined the city. The promise of work lured many, and these immigrants and migrants gave the city a vibrancy and diversity. The automobile made dispersed neighborhoods possible, and the driven city failed to desegregate demographics. The narrative of Detroit’s twentieth-century history has been researched and recounted by scholars such as Thomas Sugrue whose seminal work, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, continues to inform our understanding of the city. Detroit’s narrative also filtered through popular culture mediums, including the musician Eminem’s movie 8th Mile in 2002. The artist and music from the film featured in Chrysler’s compellingly repackaged history of the city in its (2011) advertisement Imported from Detroit. Three photographic portraits of the city, Lost Detroit, Reimagining Detroit, and Detroit Dissembled, present its abandoned landscape and, in that vacancy, the seeds for civic recovery. These books gloss over the social divide, unless the viewer uses them as a lens into the context of the planning, construction and dislocation that occurred in the renewal of the city, in the coming of one vision of modernity in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
In 1935 to 1940, surveys for the HOLC mapped Detroit’s domestic architectural landscape and those records of demographics and dwellings reiterate how modernity came in shifts. It disrupted customary patterns and rendered some building forms obsolete. In reaction to the disappearing landscape and the folkways that shaped it, HABS’s founding documents vowed that these buildings should not “pass into unrecorded oblivion.” HABS created a picture of the past not unlike the specific, visual presentations of Detroit crafted in the early twenty-first century. Taken together, the two federal programs provide a reading of Detroit just as the urban life there reached a critical point. How does that presentation of modernity effect planning
129 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 efforts for reviving a contemporary city today?
Ruhr/Detroit: Reading Post-Industrial Designs in Dialogue Julia Sattler, TU Dortmund University, Germany
At first glance, a comparison between Germany’s Ruhr Valley and Detroit, MI, appears to be a rather unlikely undertaking, and doomed to failure: Not only was the Ruhr famous for coal and steel instead of automobiles, but additionally, due to dissimilar planning systems in Germany and in the U.S., the formats and financial strategies of dealing with de- industrialization in both places differ significantly.
At second glance, there are several interesting points of overlap some which I will explore in this talk: the attempt to establish a discourse of reviving these places through art is one; the question of how to deal with abandoned industrial and commercial zones is another. Both concepts are linked to the industrial labor which at one point made the Ruhr and Detroit successful and strong, and to its continuing absence in the age of global capitalism. They lead to us to ask questions about what could be done in order to preserve the memory of industrial labor in the post-industrial age, and of how to productively include crucial questions of social class and of migration into these strategies. The Ruhr and Detroit, both being confronted with challenges such as urban shrinkage and decay, redevelopment, unemployment and manifold other social issues, in their respective processes of urban transformation, need to invent new ways of narrating themselves, of narrating the urban, and of narrating the changes they have been confronted with.
In my talk I will highlight different debates surrounding the question of how to deal with the industrial past spatially. The fact that both the Ruhr and Detroit grew with the industry, meaning not systematically and without a comprehensive plan, has produced non- linear landscapes of multiple historical layers which often do not seem to “fit” to or communicate with each other. At the same time, these non-linear sites no longer involved in the global production economy could be considered not only hindrances to development or even failures, but rather, they could be assets hinting at the complexities of history and the multiplicity of possibilities for the future. I will specifically look at redevelopment attempts in both regions that try to work with the existing non-linear narrative instead of disrupting it by way of the demolition of former industrial and commercial structures, and explore options of actively including the past into present redevelopment efforts.
Session G4: Art in the Public Realm Chair: Sarah Schrank, California State University, Long Beach Comment: Aaron Shkuda, Stanford University
Bulldozers as Paintbrushes: Earthwork Artists and the Reshaping of the Postwar American Landscape Francesca Russello Ammon, University of Pennsylvania
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a group of young, primarily male artists began
130 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 incorporating new kinds of tools and canvases into their work. They were inspired, in part, by the large-scale earthmoving work then destructively reshaping the postwar American landscape for suburban tract housing, interstate highways, and strip mining development. This is to say nothing of the ongoing clearance of the urban built environment for urban renewal as well. Artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria responded to the powerful new possibilities offered by postwar construction equipment. They moved their studios into the landscape, took up bulldozers as paintbrushes (as one of these artists put it), and moved earth in the creation of creative works. This loose artistic movement became known as the Earthworks.
While Earthwork artists varied in their particular choices of materials, locations, and artistic forms, they also shared much in common. Nearly all sought to use their art to explore the impact of time and natural and man-made forces upon the natural and built environment. In counterpoint to the contemporary contractor and engineer—who cleared away in order to create deceptively flat, blank slates for new construction—these artists dug and cut to produce mounds, voids, and gaping holes. Rather than covering it up, they placed upon a pedestal the acts of landscape removal and reshaping. In effect, these artists repurposed the bulldozer’s often destructive capacities in order to expose new social, political, and cultural possibilities. On occasion beginning their work on sites where the mining and highway work was complete, some of them even extended their projects from the goals of cultural representation and criticism alone to social and environmental reclamation as well. As they helped reuse sites that had been despoiled in the pursuit of profit, they gave visual and material form to the late postwar period’s growing critique of the culture of clearance.
The Public Space of Cinema: An Archaeology of Three Urban Networks Thomas Forget, UNC Charlotte School of Architecture
The architectural typology of the cinema reconfigured the public realm of the European metropolis between 1920 and 1970. During this era, differing practices of media dissemination supported opposing notions of the city. The avant-garde considered venues of projection as locations through which to disseminate revolutionary rhetoric to a mass audience. The commercial movie industry, meanwhile, understood cinemas as environments through which to promote escapism, assuage social disengagement, and procure financial profit. To control the territory of cinema was to control the social and political landscape of the city. This paper examines three networks of urban cinemas from this era that demonstrate ways in which the apparatus of the medium participated in the creation of various types of public space.
Johan Friedrich Geist’s seminal book, Arcades: The History of a Building Type (MIT Press, 1985), inspires this research. Like the arcades of the nineteenth century, cinemas are venues of dislocation—spaces that are both a part of the city and apart from it. They blurred class distinctions, expanded perceptual horizons, and created an entirely new understanding of the public realm of the city. The power of Geist’s analysis of the arcades lay in its use of both archaeological surveying and textual research. Likewise, the author of this paper (who is an architect, urban planner, and writer) has conducted original field research on two under-documented networks of cinemas (in Paris and in New York City), as well as archival research on a relatively well-documented third network (in Berlin). In addition, the
131 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 author has engaged the critical discourse on moviegoing in the writings of the Frankfurt School, as well as philosophies of perception and interpretations of the public realm that resonate with the emergence of the three networks. The perceptual theories of Bergson, Bazin, and Delueze are as important to the project as the urban theories of Lefebvre, Habermas, and Harvey.
An adjacent objective of this research is to inform the current emergence of new- media venues in the contemporary city. As traditional notions of cinema retreat from the public realm and vanish into mobile devices and private homes, the city is losing a critical instrument of social engagement—the spatial infrastructure of moviegoing. While the ability of new- media to escape the limits of place in one sense democratizes the media apparatus and reconfigures the political and social landscapes of communication, something is lost. New architectural typologies and networks of media dissemination must take advantage both of emerging technologies and of evolving social practice in order to activate the public of the contemporary city; however, the designers of these networks must be aware of the historical trajectories of their practices.
Session G5: Community Power and Planning Chair: Karen Murray, York University Comment: Karen Murray, York University
Spatial Politics in Metropolitan Miami, 1980-1992: Cuban American Crisis, Community Development, and Empowerment Hector Fernando Burga, UC Berkeley
In this paper I examine the urban history of Cuban American empowerment in metropolitan Miami from 1980 to 1992, through the concept of “spatial politics” – the use of space by urban communities to claim government control. By combining archival research, GIS mappings, visual documentation, and interviews with retired metropolitan planners and community development specialists, I consider how Cuban Americans engaged in performative, discursive, electoral, planning-oriented, and allied activities over three stages – crisis, community development, and empowerment – which resulted in the transformation of Miami’s political status quo. Metropolitan planners contributed to this spatial politics by producing demographic data that facilitated the development of a Cuban American community development system, which in turn engaged public policy, economic development and housing. These provisions led to the concentration of ethnic bloc voting and the election of Cuban American leadership at the municipal and county level. This untold urban history, situated in the aftermath of the Mariel Boatlift, demonstrates that urban historians need to analyze how urban space is contested, produced and managed by immigrants in order to fully understand how immigrant incorporation operates in American cities. Spatial politics is a conceptual tool to aid in this understanding.
Session G6: Building “Slums” Chair: Carl Nightingale, University at Buffalo Comment: Carl Nightingale, University at Buffalo
132 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
“Whoever Planned South Regent Did a Great Job”: A Youthful Regent Park, 1958-1968 Ryan K. James, York University
This paper approaches planning history through the lens of historical ethnography to trace the lived effects of modernist redevelopment and Keynesian social policy for those who grew up in Toronto’s Regent Park shortly after it was completed. Nationally renowned as Canada’s oldest and largest social housing complex, Regent Park was built in the late 1940s and 1950s following a postwar “slum clearance” initiative, and was initially planned and administered as two separate projects. Regent Park North, the older of the two, was initially celebrated as a resounding success – a modern, expert-designed solution to the disrepair and supposed degeneracy of the neighbourhood it replaced, and a model for future projects that would continue to alleviate an acute housing shortage. The newer Regent Park South, however, was widely criticized nearly as soon as it opened and was condemned as a “colossal flop” by a local newspaper in 1968. As the model of the modernist social housing project fell out of favour across North America, Regent Park North was soon labelled a failure as well, and North and South alike became stigmatized and stereotyped as relics of an outdated ideology that allegedly isolated, demeaned, and endangered their residents. Today, Regent Park is being razed and rebuilt as a mix of social and market housing, retail space, and other amenities, as part of a “social mix” approach that is touted as panacea for the ostensible failures of modernism.
This paper argues that this now-commonsensical rebuke of the planning and design of Regent Park relies on a facile, politically convenient misrepresentation of the diverse lived experiences of people who grew up in the community. In reconstructing their youth in 1950s and 60s Regent Park, many participants emphasize the pleasures and conveniences of life in a working class enclave, while some highlight the varying degrees of upward mobility exhibited by their families since their time in Regent Park. Many retain an enduring faith in the hegemonic notions of meritocracy, hard work, and moral uprightness that underpinned the creation of the projects. Their wistful memories are tempered, however, by sober reflections on the classism and stigmatization that shaped and constrained the directions of their lives, and the youth violence and vandalism that emerged out of the boredom and frustrations of life in a low-income community. Though a few participants said the planning and architecture of Regent Park exacerbated these challenges, most attributed such problems to broader turmoil and inequity affecting urban Canada in general. Some were offended by the notion that Regent Park was poorly planned, such as a woman who said emphatically, “whoever planned South Regent did a great job.”
From Slums to Communities? Naming and Counter-Naming the Urban Periphery in the Americas, 1940s-2000s Sean Purdy, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Favela in Brazil, colonia popular in Mexico, poblacione in Chile, villa miséria in Argentina, rancho in Venezuela, ghetto and slum in the United States and Canada – all the countries of the Americas have developed distinct terms to label “marginalized” urban spaces. This paper proposes a broad-ranging survey and analysis of the nomenclature used to label poor
133 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 urban neighbourhoods in the Americas. Based on extensive primary sources from Brazil, the United States and Canada (media, state planners reports, oral testimony and popular culture) as well as a wide-ranging reading of the secondary literature for the Americas as a whole, it emphasizes the importance of negative labeling in the external marginalization of such areas and how such characterizations were assimilated, adapted and resisted by poor urban dwellers. The “marginalized” spaces of North and Latin American cities were not solely seen as areas of poverty; they were regarded as sites of socially and culturally disorganized populations characterized by dangerous social pathologies. Indeed, they were frequently viewed as distinct physical, cultural, political and even sexual threats to the larger society and in the twenty-first century continue to generate a substantial amount of interest in government, academic and media circles as well as in popular culture. These representations, including a pervasive negative labeling, were not free-floating ideological constructions, but real reflections and shapers of local spatial and social divisions with concrete economic and social consequences for poor urban residents.
Yet if specific locales such as slums, ghettos and favelas held significant meanings for external observers on an ideological and political level so too were they invested with what Diane Reay and Helen Lucy call “powerful associations and emotive resonances” for poor residents. In addition to larger structures of political economy, physical places also conditioned what Raymond Williams long ago called “structures of feeling,” that powerfully shaped the attitudes of people who lived within particular neighborhoods. Forty years of sociological, ethnographic and to a lesser extent, historical research, have demonstrated that the inhabitants of poor urban areas were not passive victims of circumstances. I thus also explore in the paper the “counter-naming” of poor urban dwellers, that is, how residents themselves named their own homes and neighbourhoods in an attempt to cope with and resist stigmatization and social exclusion.
In the uneven process of social, cultural and political organization throughout the post- war period, the poor sometimes accepted negative labels, but also frequently applied their own colloquial names to their neighbourhoods, assimilated negative terms but invested them with different meanings, or purposely adopted the positive, official labels of experts and the state. Local circumstances and traditions shaped the choice of labels by both external observers and poor residents, but the poor were active agents who shaped their own particular historical outcomes, capable of contesting in diverse ways the brutalizing characterizations by external observers of their neighbourhoods, homes and lives.
Sex Panic! And the Politics of Blight: The Haight-Ashbury Before the Summer of Love Damon Scott, Miami University
In the early 1960s—several years before the arrival of the hippies—the residents of the Haight- Ashbury district faced a series of threats that undermined the character, autonomy, and economic vitality of the neighborhood. These included the growing concentration of power in the hands of urban planners, the repeated attempts of urban planners to bisect the neighborhood with a new freeway, and the influx of African Americans displaced by inner city slum clearance projects. In a climate of anxiety over these destabilizing pressures, local leaders and residents mobilized to preserve the neighborhood as a “good” place to live and raise a
134 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 family. This moral coding of the neighborhood was tested by the refurbishing and reopening of the vacant neighborhood theater under new management that sought to draw in homosexual patrons through offerings of ‘campy’ films and drag performances. Local activists saw the “homosexual theater” as a threat to the character of the neighborhood—foreshadowing the end of a way of life rooted in family and neighborly interactions. While arguing for the closure of the theater and expulsion of the “merchants of filth,” local leaders pressed for the integration of its new, non-white residents into a model multi-racial neighborhood. The articulation of what constitutes the neighborhood as a “good” place created room for racial diversity, while explicitly denying space for sexual minorities. Looking comparatively at the reception of racialized and sexualized outsiders highlights the complex ways race and sexuality are imbricated in community formation and neighborhood mobilization.
Session G7: Digital Humanities, Placemaking, and Public Humanities Chair: Seamus Ross, University of Toronto Comment: Seamus Ross, University of Toronto
The Layers of Leaside Geoff Kettel, Independent Scholar
The Town of Leaside was incorporated by Act of the Ontario Legislature on April 23, 1913. Its motto “Stability and Wisdom of Purpose”, has fairly characterised the community to the present day. Leaside began as a railway and industrial centre and has grown into the thriving midtown Toronto neighbourhood it is today. In 1912 the Canadian Northern Company commissioned the notable Montreal landscape architect, Frederick Todd, to lay out a model town in Leaside. The town was built out in basic conformity to this plan. Leaside was the first planned community in Ontario.
The town of Leaside was incorporated in 1913, with 43 residents. In 1967 the Town of Leaside joined with the Township of East York to form the Borough of East York. In 1998 the Borough was amalgamated with the municipalities of Metro Toronto to form the City of Toronto.
A display of artifacts, documents, and images, both physical and digital, associated with Leaside’s cultural history and landscapes is being developed as a prominent part of the celebration of the centennial of the incorporation of the Town of Leaside in 1913. Six layers of human settlement have been identified and will be described and illustrated in a set of large display panels.
This forms the central part of an exhibit to be housed and exhibited in beginning at the Leaside Library from Tuesday April 23 to Sunday April 28 2013.
The conference session will display the panels, describe the Layers and present the underlying research.
Interactive Crown Street: Participatory Methods in Planning History Elihu Rubin, Yale School of Architecture
135 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
A growing interest in “digital humanities” has begun to make archival materials and vast data collections accessible online and has raised questions about the content and form of contemporary scholarship. How can these tools be used to create layered, multimedia, and interactive texts that lend themselves not only to interpretation by professional historians, but also to appropriation by the public at large? In this paper, I draw from an ongoing research and teaching project on Crown Street in New Haven, Connecticut, to consider the challenges and opportunities of doing interactive public history, in which the goal is not to write a singular, authoritative narrative but to construct an interactive armature that invites the contributions of many voices. It is a method of doing urban and planning history, I suggest, that mirrors the now well-accepted practices of participatory planning.
From the Italianate mansions characteristic of New Haven’s high tide as a mercantile power to the monumental parking garages of the urban renewal period, the built environment of Crown Street is a rich source for historians interested in the conflicting forces that have contributed to urban change over the past two centuries. Today, Crown Street is a vital and contested place with several distinct nodes of activity, including a popular entertainment zone that floods with revelers on Friday and Saturday nights. There are many stories about planning, development, and design that may be told through the prism of Crown Street. Begun as a pedagogical experiment, “Interactive Crown Street” seeks to engage those narratives by constructing a series of inventories that describe the street’s physical and programmatic development over time. Represented online and in a variety of formats (maps, photographs, soundscapes, videos, diagrams, charts, texts, and combinations of these), these inventories are intended to serve as non- hierarchical armatures to be fleshed out by local participants who create their own narratives and interpretations. In this way, “Interactive Crown Street” is a case study for an approach to urban research as a tool to cultivate broader conversations about the making and meaning of places.
MapStorytelling as an Approach to Understanding Community Change Over Time (new media presentation) Jonathan Marino, MapStory Foundation
Human beings began with words. Later came writing, which Abraham Lincoln felt was “the great invention of the world” for its ability to “enable us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn at all distances of time and space.”
In recent centuries, inventions like the printing press and the telegraph poured fuel on the fire of our stories by enabling them to spread more rapidly across a broader geography. And in the current moment, the personal computer and its internet are transforming this human practice again and again.
MapStorytelling is an extension of these ancient traditions, utilizing leading technologies to empower a global user community to organize their knowledge about the world spatially and temporally. While humanity shares one past, the ways in which individuals and groups have experienced this past differs widely. Through a process we call ‘MapStorytelling’, we can dramatically increase the layers of perspective we have access to, adjudicate the quality of these
136 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013 perspectives based on the data they bring forward, and enable those layers to interact with each other and accumulate so that our collective perspective grows over time.
We realize the vision of MapStorytelling through MapStory (www.MapStory.org), a social platform that empowers a large community of experts to “crowd source” data within a geospatial and temporal framework. MapStory enables the organization of expert knowledge worldwide and over the course of history, and makes it easily accessible to a global user community.
MapStory, as a World Wide Web application and data repository, supports long-term, sustained data collection efforts by a global community of experts, each of whom hails from a passionate information community that cultivates specialized expertise. MapStory represents these data in a standardized, searchable format (to include geospatial and temporal/chronological search), and in such a way that these data can easily be accessed, analyzed and visualized – particularly geospatially and temporally.
The ultimate goal is to enable anyone on the globe to tap the power of this new mode of conveying one’s stories, arrayed across geography and as they unfold over time. MapStory should become the place where MapStorytellers of all kinds convene to publish their expressions, and to critique each others’ MapStories, leading to a consistently accumulating and improving global body of knowledge about natural and sociocultural dynamics, worldwide, over the course of human history.
Session G8: From Slums to Smog: The Visual Rhetoric of Urban Problems and Planning Solutions Chair: Sara Stevens, Rice University Comment: Sara Stevens, Rice University
Photographers as Historians, Recording a Vanishing World: The Case of 1940s and 1950s Slum Housing Photographs in New York and Los Angeles Steven Moga, New York University
The photo collections of public housing authorities represent a remarkable set of visual archival records documenting city life, housing conditions, demolished “slum” neighborhoods, new housing projects, and public relations efforts in American cities. Often maintained today by public or university libraries instead of the housing authorities that produced them, these photographs are widely acknowledged to have significant historical value. And planning and urban historians, researchers, and other urban observers may now easily access them through internet-friendly databases. But how and why they were produced, by whom, and what role they may have played in public discussions of “slums” and “projects” is frequently unknown or overlooked. In this paper, I examine the production, use, and interpretation of 1940s and 1950s slum housing photographs in New York and Los Angeles. I argue that these collections, by drawing our attention to areas of the city now long ago demolished, inadvertently suggest a larger story about photography, planning, and planning history.
137 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Housing authority photographs of slums during this era can be documentary in spirit— stylistically straight-ahead, un-artistic, or mundane in their recordation of the facts—and, at the same time, loaded with the historical knowledge that the people responsible for making the images were also involved in destroying the places depicted. The planning story, as it were, is inseparable from the images. As such, the public housing authority photograph exemplifies the problems as well as the potential of interpreting photographs in urban planning—photographs may document the past, illustrate three-dimensional scenes, evoke truthfulness, or help set a narrative in place, but they should also raise questions about their own production, function, purposes, and uses. Not infrequently, photographs also reveal incidental details or more than they are “meant” to show, such as the make and model of now-vintage automobiles on a city street, a quality that may become more pronounced over time (Tagg, Barthes). Looking at both what’s inside the photograph and outside it (historical context), the paper probes the visual rhetoric of slum photographs and, taking this particular case as a point of departure, sketches out a method for photographic interpretation in planning.
Graphs and Glooms in the Lost City: The Visual Rhetoric of Smog in Los Angeles Meredith Drake Reitan, University of Southern California
On July 26, 1943, a day that would later become known as “Black Wednesday,” a thick pall of smoke caused wide spread panic as it enveloped Los Angeles. Initially, a plant run by the Southern California Gas Company was blamed for the eye-stinging smog attack. However as the intensity and frequency of the dark days grew, Angelenos began to fear that their days of smoke free sunshine were coming to an end. Anxious about the emergence of “another Pittsburgh”, the political response to the repeated smog episodes was almost immediate. In 1945, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appointed a Director of Air Pollution Control and in 1946 legislation by the State of California empowered the County to establish an Air Pollution Control District to enforce pollution ordinances. Yet, without a clear understanding of the source of the smog, these early control efforts were extremely limited.
This paper focuses on the production, the nature and the reception of the scientific, political and publically generated images that accompanied the discussion of smog in Los Angeles in the immediate post war period. Specifically, it investigates how each of these visual discourses attempted to shape the response of municipal planners and policy makers. There is a substantial body of work on the history and politics of environmental regulation and a smaller, but growing literature on smog. Yet relatively little research has examined the rhetorical effect of the images created as part of the campaigns for regulation. In arguing for and against pollution control, stakeholders relied upon distinct visual genres and developed new visual idioms to make their claims. A particularly common visual trope in the popular press was the view of the stagnant haze from the observation deck of Los Angeles’ City Hall. Other photographs focus on the human toll caused by the pollution by showing citizens clutching handkerchiefs to their eyes, gasping for air and wearing gas masks. Alternately, the Committee on Smoke and Fumes funded by the Western Oil and Gas Association produced a dizzying array of charts and graphs to deny the involvement of hydrocarbons in smog creation. The visual output of these campaigns is more than mere propaganda; it serves as an important record of the thinking of various constituencies and the often ambiguous ways that images come together to create meaning in the public realm.
138 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
“Better than 10,000 Words”: Photographs, the Atlanta Housing Authority, and the Construction of Public Housing’s Early Image, 1938-1948 Katie Marages Schank, George Washington University
While historians of housing have studied the evolution of debates and implementation of New Deal era housing programs, they have paid relatively little attention to how reformers and housing authorities gained popular support for early public housing projects using images. Although the photographs, architectural renderings, and maps that represent early housing projects are not unfamiliar, these visual materials have not been analyzed for their own cultural meaning or for what they reveal about the places they show. By examining the visual images that were a prominent element of the Atlanta Housing Authority’s annual reports and promotional materials during the organization’s first decade, this paper investigates depictions of public housing as modern, safe, and sanitary, and therefore worthy of public support from white, middle-class city residents.
Particularly relevant to this public campaign were the racial identities that these visual materials sought to inscribe on public housing and slums. Although new projects were built in equal numbers for African Americans and for whites up until the 1960s, the annual reports played to racist attitudes in order to gain support by publishing images of public housing residents as predominantly white, and thereby “desirable.” Alternatively, images of slums almost exclusively portrayed African Americans, thus reinforcing a preexisting association between their racial identity and that of the slum dweller.
Using carefully selected images of the city’s slum housing, the Housing Authority employed a carefully scripted visual rhetoric. It aimed to demonstrate that the newly built public housing would eliminate the dirt, disease, and vice of the slums by providing a clean, modern environment in which residents could raise their standards of living. Images of domestic life – families gathered around the radio, women surrounded by modern appliances, children riding tricycles against the backdrop of verdant lawns – mirrored contemporaneous images of middle- class single-family homes and garden apartments.
As the first city to erect a federally funded public housing project under the Public Works Administration and with an active housing authority that had eight housing projects completed or under construction within two years of its establishment in 1938, Atlanta serves as an excellent case study in the shaping of public housing’s early image. Indeed, housing officials, planners, and reformers from other cities and countries often visited the city’s housing projects and sought the Housing Authority’s expert advice. Furthermore, with its low-rise, low-density housing projects, Atlanta is more representative than the frequently examined cities with predominantly high-rise, high-density public housing such as Chicago and New York.
Session G9: At the Edge of Town: The Making of New Metropolitan Places in the 19th Century Chair: Aaron Wunsch, University of Pennsylvania School of Design Comment: Aaron Wunsch, University of Pennsylvania School of Design
139 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
“The Best Place in the City to Live In”: The Rise of Elite Park Slope, 1867-1897 Joshua Britton, Lehigh University
After the completion of Prospect Park in 1867, Brooklyn boosters had good reason to expect a real estate boom around the park; Prospect Park’s co-designer Frederick Law Olmsted predicted as much early on into the park’s development, and shrewd speculators had bought up a great deal of land surrounding the park as early as the 1850s. Yet, not even the most optimistic observer could predict the rapidity of “the Slope’s” growth, nor the number of wealthy retailers, industrialists, and executives and city officials that would transform the area into one of New York’s most exclusive neighborhoods by the 1880s. Indeed, Park Slope would challenge Brooklyn Heights for social and economic supremacy in the city of Brooklyn. By the end of the century, the area was home to such wealth that it earned the nickname “The Gold Coast.” Indeed, such was the area’s prominence that the Citizen Guide to Brooklyn could state in 1893 that “the leading clubs in town are located [in Park Slope] and the section has won the highest social position from the people who live in it.”
As part of a wider panel on metropolitan real estate developments of the nineteenth century for SACRPH’s biennial conference, my paper will explore the rise of Park Slope as an elite neighborhood in the context of its competition with Brooklyn Heights. Scholars have long been interested in the process of urban upper-class migration, dating back to the pioneering work of sociologist E. Digby Baltzell in his Philadelphia Gentlemen (1958), but few works have examined the role of competition between upper-class neighborhoods and how it affected the physical shape of the city. In Brooklyn’s case, the development of Park Slope drew a new class of post-Civil War elites to the city of Brooklyn. Once they settled in, they challenged the social dominance of older mercantile elites by creating their own social clubs and cultural institutions. They funded the expansion of the city, and in so doing presaged a new commercial, development-oriented vision of Brooklyn’s future. This clashed with the Heights elite’s idealization of Brooklyn as “a city of homes and churches,” and the confrontation between old and new presaged a later battle around consolidation with New York City.
Ultimately, this paper analyzes the development of the elite neighborhood of Park Slope through a socio-cultural framework, and argues that the establishment of Park Slope was a key moment in the history of the city of Brooklyn. The commercially- minded nouveau riche who lived in Park Slope helped Brooklyn expand its borders and ultimately became the biggest supporters of consolidation in Brooklyn. Their influence transformed Brooklyn into a modern commercial city.
Building on the “Hill”: Howard University, Community Reform, and the Development of Black Metropolitan Washington, DC at the Turn of the 20th Century Melissa Horne, Rutgers University
In 1867, a committee was formed to find the site for the newly founded Howard University—an institution whose student body was to be predominantly black. The future site of Howard was located just outside of Washington, D.C. in Washington County. The property, known as the “Hill,” was situated in one of the least desirable areas of the county and counted among its neighbors an assortment of beer gardens, saloons, cabarets and an amusement park.
140 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Moreover, when Howard officials announced the plans to locate the predominantly black school in the suburban “slum,” local white landowners feared that the “negro school would spoil the property round about.”
Yet, by the turn of the twentieth century, this suburban community once on the fringe of District society had become the center of one of the nation’s most successful metropolitan black commercial, entertainment, and residential enclaves. Contrary to the fears and rumors that surrounded the Howard land purchase, the nearby neighborhoods did not “spoil.” Instead, the community thrived, becoming known nationally as the “cultural capital” of black America.
The history of black higher education institutions at the turn of the century has largely focused on the ways in which these schools were sites for race advancement, founded to cultivate a professional class of leaders for social, economic, and political uplift. Significantly less attention though, has been given to the ways in which black colleges and universities applied these educational ideals to the uplift and development of black communities. Indeed, beyond their stated educational imperative, black colleges and universities—from school officials to the student body— were central to the project of urban development and reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the transformation of the “Hill.”
This paper explores Howard University’s role in community building, development, and reform at the turn of the twentieth century. University officials played a major role in the economic development of the community. For example, school administrators leveraged the University’s position as the major landholder in the community to control residential and business expansion—a process that would continue into the early twentieth century. In addition to promoting economic growth, Howard served as an important site for cultural development and entertainment, opening up Howard University campus to local residents who attended lectures, recitals, and sporting events. Lastly, faculty and students performed an integral role in the project of community uplift by forging a strong link between town and gown. It was largely through their organizational efforts and reform initiatives that led to the transformation of the “Hill” from a suburban community on the periphery of the nation’s capital to a cultural metropolis for black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.
Staten Island and the Emergence of a Metropolitan Real Estate Market, 1814-1840 Adam Zalma, Rutgers University
Today, Manhattan is virtually synonymous with New York City; Staten Island is an afterthought, if thought of at all. Yet, in the early decades of the 19th Century, most of Manhattan was not much different from Staten Island. By the 1830s, Manhattan land east of Greenwich Village and Staten Island land facing the harborfront became hotbeds of suburban experimentation -- the northern and southern frontiers of a metropolitan real estate market. The same owners, developers, speculators and financiers that invested in Manhattan land bought up more than 1,500 acres of Staten Island in the 1830s and platted them into tens of thousands of standard Manhattan-sized lots. The transfer of ownership from Staten Islanders to Manhattanites mattered. Manhattan investors in Staten Island land signaled, shaped and marketed their properties as new metropolitan ‘places,’ as they had east of Greenwich Village. As they had in
141 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Manhattan, they set aside land and built homes for themselves on Staten Island. Yet the pattern of development along the northern and eastern shores of Staten Island was different than east of Greenwich Village. Manhattan investors and speculators formed the New Brighton Association and the Staten Island Association to organize and market their vast Staten Island land in metropolitan terms to a metropolitan marketplace. Their development ideas, marketing pitches and organization of the land on Staten Island can tell us much about the shape and meaning of metropolitan space in the early 19th century.
As part of a wider panel on metropolitan real estate developments of the nineteenth century, my paper will explore the inclusion of Staten Island in New York’s emerging real estate market in the context of the city’s northern real estate frontier east of Greenwich Village. Scholars have long been interested in the growth and expansion of the 19th century city, but few works have explored the role of the real estate market and marketing in the shape and form of the 19th century metropolis, especially at the urban edge. I argue that the development of ‘urban’ and ‘suburban’ places of the early 19th century were part of a single metropolitan process rooted in the organization and valuing of land, even as the pattern of development of Manhattan and Staten Island emerged differently. In Staten Island’s case, the real estate boom of the 1830s brought new land owners and new visions to the Island’s farms, woods and meadows. Even as the visions of the New Brighton and Staten Island Associations faded in the wake of the Panic of 1837, the shift of land to owners with metropolitan lives and expectations revalued and repurposed Staten Island land in metropolitan terms.
Session G10: Remembering and Honoring the Work of Clyde Woods Co-Chair: Jeffrey Lowe, Texas Southern University Co-Chair: Jacob Wagner, University of Missouri-Kansas City
“Today, planning theory, history, practice, and language are once again being marshaled to implement and rationalize African American and Latino enclosures. The “urban revitalization” movement of the talented has been juxtaposed with the image of the poor, dying, violent, and untalented communities of color. Again, regimes of power and privilege are being reinforced, and celebrated. Questions of racial, ethnic and class equity have been meticulously excised from the literature of new regionalism, smart growth, sustainable communities and creative communities. We are forced once again to ask whether the new pharaohs will meet the same fate as those of old. Will they learn to sing the Blues again?” --Clyde Woods
Urban Planning and Black Studies scholar Clyde Woods passed on July 6, 2011. Please join us in a panel at the fall 2013 conference of The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) to honor and remember Clyde Woods and his scholarship. Professor Clyde Woods’ book, Development Arrested - Race, Power and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta (Verso, 1998), was the focus of a symposium in the Journal of Planning History in 2004. As such, it is most appropriate that The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) host a conversation about the life and work of Clyde Woods.
142 Society for American City and Regional Planning History October 2013
Dr. Woods’ work is ground breaking for the field of planning history and for all scholars seeking to understand the long history of racialization in the United States as a key component of our political economy and regional development patterns. In this panel we seek to remember both the man and his research contribution through reflection and discussion of the ways in which his work impacted our scholarship, our planning practices, and the field of planning history and theory more broadly.
His scholarship is significant to our practice as planning historians for several reasons. His worked carved out a space for the African-American, working-class experience in planning theory and history. His worked opened our eyes to the Blues as a framework for understanding and explaining the American experience. We can now talk about the Blues as both an epistemology for our research and as a grassroots vision that inspires communities of color to mobilize against the forces of discrimination, concentrated poverty and structural racism.
Moving forward, we want to share the memory of Clyde Woods and the conceptual tools that his work provides with a new generation of scholars. We seek presentations that articulate the legacy of his work and seek to extend its vision to new case studies and histories of planning. The power and significance of his unfinished research project calls out to each of us to re-engage with the work and to extend it to new areas of study.
Each scholar will give a short presentation/reflection (10 minutes each) on the work of Clyde Woods and the impact on one's scholarship. We will then welcome everyone in the room to share their own experiences and thoughts.
Mia White, UC Santa Barbara
Katherine McKittrick, Queen’s University
Jeffrey Lowe, Texas Southern University
Jacob Wagner, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Khalil Shahyd, University of Delaware
143